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A Nationwide Comcast Landline Outage is Affecting Thousands of Businesses (theverge.com)
Comcast's Xfinity phone service is apparently suffering a massive outage today, knocking out phone service for thousands of companies across the country that still largely rely on landline access to do business. From a report: According to DownDetector.com, Comcast phone service began experiencing issues around 8AM ET this morning and by the afternoon, areas around the country have started reporting disruptions. The areas most affected appear to be the Pacific Northwest, California, the tri-state area, and Florida. The official support Twitter account for Comcast Xfinity's residential and business services has acknowledged the issues, tweeting at 1PM ET today that some "customers may still be experiencing an issue with their Voice service," though Comcast has yet to release an official statement regarding the issue.
I've just been on the phone with Comcast for over 2 hours. This is from Chicago down to Florida and spread all over. I have locations that I take care of across Georgia and Florida and every single Comcast location is affected. VoIP and landlines alike. They can't even forward the lines I need forwarded because their system has locked the Voice team out of that function.
This is the second time in, what?, 6 months or so that they've been hit with a vast, multi-state outage. We depend on fax lines (yes, still the most secure form of communication when it comes to HIPAA and related issues - plus the easiest to train/utilize), and my company will be missing everything from our affected locations for 4+ hours. Tens of thousands of dollars in immediate jeopardy with much more in possible losses to come.
Want to bet we won't even get a credit on our next bill? Ma Bell might have been a bastard monopolistic company, but copper lines in the ground had better up-time than a lot of what I've witnessed moving to VoIP and such technologies. Now get off my lawn, you're standing on the fiber lines.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
At roughly 2PM (the past few minutes), service is finally appearing to work again. It was out since start of day at this business at 8AM. Firstly, Comcast Business is not the same as Comcast / Xfinity in terms of service and reliability. I manage an office that uses Comcast Business, and this is the first major outage we've experience since getting the service years ago, save for one time an idiot from a different company literally cut the fiber line a block away from the building.
The phone service is VoIP based, not POTS based. There are very few companies that offer the level of service this business needed, and of those, competitors wanted over $1000/mo each, whereas Comcast is a fraction of that price. Yeah, inb4 "you get what you pay for" - other companies have outages too, they just don't make the front page because they're smaller entities that most have never heard of (our previous contract was with Integra)
Comcast service was not entirely out, only 99%ish out. Outgoing calls could not be made. Incoming calls from most providers would flat out fail. A few (Tmobile for example) would ring through, but voice would not exchange after pickup. I'm personally on Google's Project Fi with my cell phone and could ring through and talk perfectly (but again, could not call out to my phone from the business).
At roughly 2PM (the past few minutes), service is finally appearing to work again. It was out since start of day at this business at 8AM.
I work at 9-1-1.
EVERYONE should have a landline, even if you never use it. The day you need it for 9-1-1, you'll be glad.
See, it's not just the reliability of landline...it's the instant and infallible (mostly) address lookup.
Any other calling service, IP phones, VoIP software, cellular, radio, satellite...you have a slim chance of the address appearing instantly on the dispatcher's screen. A few seconds can be the difference between dying and living. Also, FYI many calls include a caller who CAN'T say where they are due to suffering, bleeding, screaming, fear, being chased, burning flames, etc. YOU WANT YOUR ADDRESS TO APPEAR AUTOMATICALLY.
I doesn't sound like you know much about VoIP to understand why UDP was chosen for the RTP. SIP can use TCP and often does.
Timing is everything in a real-time voice communication. Late packets are useless, hence the reliability of TCP doesn't improve anything. On the contrary: TCP retransmissions delays make the problem worse. A late/missed UDP packet may not even be noticeable (20 ms of audio) or just a brief drop out. A 100 ms retransmission delay in TCP will delay the entire stream, thus causing increased latency making the call sound awkward -- people talking at the same time.
In practice a small amount of packet loss isn't catastrophic to VOIP. Each RTP packet is independent so processing resumes with a next packet if a previous one is lost or late. The problem is large jitter (varying amount of delay, like > 20 ms) and too much delay (>200 ms). Unfortunately shitty routers without QOS flood the connection and both of these metrics are easily broken.