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With how many 9's of availability, and at what latency? Frontier is advertising 3 nines average network-wide availability for their new fiber network. Three n
by hedora 3y ago
With how many 9's of availability, and at what latency?
Frontier is advertising 3 nines average network-wide availability for their new fiber network. Three nines is completely unacceptable, but our neighborhood barely got one nine last year.
Based on their current behavior, there's zero chance of them providing the bandwidths they're advertising for the new build out, even when the network is completely up and completely idle. Currently, if we try to sign up, they say we can get <<1 mbps (bits) theoretical. However, the internet coverage maps claim they provide broadband service to our address, so they must be claiming > 25Mbps to the FCC.
- reaperman 3y agoI'd be fine with 99.9% availability to my house. That means it's down for at most 9 hours per year. That's probably on par with how much my electricity goes out during an average winter. But what they mean by "99.9% network-wide availability" and what I mean by "99.9% availability to my house" are very, very different things.
- hedora 3y agoIt could also mean nine one hour outages during working hours or one out of 1000 web browser requests fail on average. However, I suspect that the actual availability is extremely skewed, given the one nine they delivered to our area.
- reaperman 3y ago> It could also mean nine one hour outages during working hours or one out of 1000 web browser requests fail on average. Totally fine with both of these, even as someone who works from home. > However, I suspect that the actual availability is extremely skewed, given the one nine they delivered to our area. And this is what I'd find unacceptable.
- oivey 3y agoThat’s crazy. If my electric was out for that long consistently I’d lose my shit. That’s totally unacceptable.
- tanepiper 3y agoI guess we can count you out the apocalypse then?
- rrr_oh_man 3y agoI was in Kazakhstan for some time. No electricity, clean/cold/hot water, heating for days at a time. In winter and in summer.
- rootusrootus 3y agoIn an urban area it would be unacceptable. It is not atypical for a rural area.
- ghaff 3y agoYeah. I don't know the exact numbers but having power out for 9 hours a year is not a freak event where I live in semi-rural New England and my impression is that it isn't for my colleagues in North Carolina either. Branches and trees come down on powerlines. I had a big tree come down in a windstorm a few months back. Lucky it didn't hit anything of mine or my neighbor or might have been a couple days.
- macNchz 3y agoI think there is a gap in awareness of this depending on where people live. My rural hometown has frequent power outages, so many people have backup generators to at least keep the furnace running. The town got popular with city people going remote during the pandemic, many of whom bought houses. I was visiting my parents a couple of years ago when the power went out for 18 hours or so during a deep cold snap. I was shocked that none of the new neighbors–who had recently completed huge costly renovation projects–had bothered to install an automatic generator.
- toast0 3y ago
- jdminhbg 3y ago> Three nines is completely unacceptable Less than 9 hrs of downtime per year is unacceptable for consumer internet?
- jedberg 3y agoIt is when you work from home.
- dwheeler 3y agoOften you can use cell phone or a coffee shop if it's say 2 days/year of internet downtime. If you need it for an emergency call, you need higher reliability, but you can prioritize, and I don't know how common landlines are any more.
- groby_b 3y agoIt is? 44 minutes outage per month is critical? I doubt that's true for most jobs. But yes, there are jobs where it is, and some of us (e.g. me ;) are just finicky about network connectivity. In which case I highly recommend having a fallback connection, with a different modality than the main one. For most of us, that means LTE. Tethering is fine if you can live with <5 min outages, but sure, you can also do automated failover. But it's not a level of service that I think is reasonable to expect from a single ISP connection. A single construction incident will burn the annual SLO budget, and there's nothing the provider can do about that. (And of course, it'd still be nice if telcos ran their backends competently. Looking at you, AT&T)
- jzb 3y agoI would be annoyed at losing a day or so of work, if the outage was all at once - but nine hours a year is tolerable. I wish my ISP was that reliable. Hell, I wish my power company was that reliable. Where I live it's common to have a number of outages longer than eight hours every year. Last year a moderate storm caused power outages for a couple of days in August affecting thousands.
- jdminhbg 3y agoGenerously, if you work 2000 hrs/year, that's less than 25% of a year's total hours, so it's only 2 hrs of work downtime on average. If you need better connectivity than that, you should pay for a higher SLA or make sure you can tether a cell connection or something.
- simlevesque 3y ago> our neighborhood barely got one nine last year Internet it available less than 10% of the year where you live ?
- bhelkey 3y agoOne nine should be 90% availability I would imagine.
- simlevesque 3y agoYeah that makes sense, I feel stupid now.
- hedora 3y agoIt was out for about a month total for some of our neighbors. (Repeated outages, not just one.)
- Johnny555 3y agoWhy isn't 3 9's acceptable for residential home internet? That's less than 9 hours of downtime a year, 44 minutes/month. Sure, I'd like 4 or even 5 9's, but I don't want to pay for it -- each additional 9 is exponentially more expensive to guarantee, and few people are willing to pay for that much reliability for their own network gear.
- Retric 3y agoActually averaging 3 9's isn't that bad. However, 3 9's looks much worse when you also miss the target. The target for phones used to be significantly higher, but with cellphones home internet is generally less safety critical.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tomrod 3y ago4 nines is reasonable, 5 nines a good target. ISPs have become utilities, especially since covid.
- uxp100 3y agoMy electrical utility does not hit 4 nines, maybe not even 3. Water and sewer? Definitely.
- ghaff 3y agoI don't have town sewer but being without water is very rare. Being without electricity for maybe the total of day a year? Not rare. (Though semi-rural albeit on a major road.) ADDED: I don't. But people having backup generators in snow country is not a weird thing.
- jltsiren 3y ago5 nines is reasonable for electricity, if you live in an urban area with no extreme weather or other major natural hazards. When I was still living in Helsinki, blackouts were basically an once-in-a-decade thing, and they didn't last long. Today in California, I'm getting 3 nines in an urban area. Those living a couple of blocks further towards the suburbs are not so lucky. And many people in the mountains don't get even 2 nines.
- SkyPuncher 3y ago3 9s is completely fine. Internet is not subject to the 911 uptime requirements. 3 9s is essentially an outage or two from a major storm. That’s fine for residential internet.
- Dylan16807 3y ago> 3 9s is completely fine. Internet is not subject to the 911 uptime requirements. It's all going over the same wire. Why not put in the extra fraction of effort?
- SkyPuncher 3y ago> It's all going over the same wire Yes and no. Even if it's going over the same wire, there are different data flows. Voice uses predictable amounts of bandwidth per phone number.
- Dylan16807 3y agoMinimum speed still requires almost all the equipment to be running.
- SkyPuncher 3y agoYes and no. * Last mile has a downed line, yes that will result in a local outage * Backhaul gets taken out. Re-route traffic. Drop/throttle non-SLA traffic
- Dylan16807 3y agoIf you're able to reroute then you should almost always be able to keep Internet service running, just slower. Not many connections are so weak that they can only carry voice.
- faeriechangling 3y agoI don't see three 9's as being unreasonable for home internet at all, getting more reliability than that is non-trivial and most people have redundancy in the form of internet on their phones or can buy a second line.
- tw04 3y agoYou can and should challenge the map then. The FCC actually has a means to do that and does respond. Ideally get an email follow up stating speeds, frontier has a habit of refusing to create a paper trail. https://help.bdc.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/articles/10476040597787-How-to-Submit-an-Availability-Challenge https://help.bdc.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/articles/10476040597787-Ho...
- FactolSarin 3y agoI did this about 18 months ago, and surprisingly, Spectrum came out and actually put a new line up my road. I'd asked them off and on for years to get broadband. Last time I'd been quoted 12k to cross the little creek they stopped at and service the dozen or so houses on my side. But for whatever reason, this time they did it for free (well, normal hookup costs) after I challenged them on the FCC site.
- nsporillo 3y agoGlad to hear that. I've been fighting to get Frontier to service my neighborhood and the best they could tell me is that there is some hidden ticket and they have no idea what the real status is. Frontier is labeled as a fiber provider for my address on the New York State PSC Broadband map and I made sure to provide some feedback to them about that claim. Would love to have even just a single alternative option besides satellite internet. I'm only 10 miles outside of the downtown area.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoThe FCC is working on an internet service notice format “modeled after the FDA nutrition labels” [1]. [1] https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels
- fbdab103 3y agoAh, so one with huge amounts of input from lobbyists. It is ridiculous that nutrition labels are not forced to standardize on something like x/100 grams (even Freedom units would be acceptable). Plus a x/package. None of this 3/8 serving size nonsense.