6 ms·

> Three nines is completely unacceptable Less than 9 hrs of downtime per year is unacceptable for consumer internet?

by jdminhbg 3y ago

jedberg 3y ago
It is when you work from home.
- dwheeler 3y ago
  Often 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 ago
  It 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 ago
  I 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 ago
  Generously, 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.
hedora 3y ago
Traditionally, it was unacceptable for landline service, since it's safety critical. (You need to be able to call 911.) I poked around to try to figure out what the current requirements are, and it looks like they've mostly been scrapped. "Central office backup power" is required, which matches my experience attempting to get terrestrial internet or cell service during power outages.
cogman10 3y ago
If we limit it to issues that the ISP owns, then I'd say yes. What does the ISP have that can cause 9 hours worth of outages throughout the year? The only thing I could think of is the ISP being targeted by a massive DDOS attack.
- wmf 3y ago
  It's easy to have a single outage over 9 hours if they wait 8 hours to send somebody out.
  - cogman10 3y ago
    lol, well yes I guess :D. I guess I'm really just spoiled. In the last 10 years I think I've only really experienced like 1 or 2 outages caused by my current ISP and they were resolved within the hour. My assumption is that like most people, all the ISP equipment is buried so the only things that can really go wrong are either at the colo or the home (like a router that dies). Having a line cut is simply a hyper rare event. On the other hand, my overhead powerlines have caused most of my outages. An idiot crashing into the telephone poll has made my power less reliable than my internet.
    - vel0city 3y ago
      Having a line in the ground won't save you when there are wild backhoes in your biome.
- tw04 3y ago
  An ice storm taking down a utility pole will blow that out of the water for several years.
- Johnny555 3y ago
  What does the ISP have that can cause 9 hours worth of outages throughout the year They have the real world -- ice storms, trees blown down by wind storms, power outages, backhoe outages, etc. A tree took out internet in my neighborhood for 2 days, others had longer outages since it was a big storm and it took a while to repair.
dghlsakjg 3y ago
I live in semi-rural Canada and get better service than that, but I would be fine with more downtime. OTOH, I frequently have scheduled power outage times that exceed that metric so it sort of doesn't matter, and that's ignoring unscheduled power outages (a necessary part of life in a temperate rain forest with above ground power). I've taken to keeping a small generator handy to power the modem.
- hedora 3y ago
  Our Internet + phone service go down if there's a power outage, which implies the cell network also goes down in practice. The tower might be up and on backup power, but it either has nothing to talk to or it's completely overwhelmed.
sib 3y ago
Yes, given that that's also the phone line for many people and therefore is an emergency service...
r1ch 3y ago
Imagine all your streaming video or calls froze for a few seconds every hour for days on end. 9 hours in one continuous outage is fine, constant short outages are infuriating.
prirun 3y ago
Depends on how the 9 hrs of downtime is distributed. It could be 6480 5-second outages (packet loss). There are 3650 10-hour workdays in a year. If those 6480 5-second dropouts occur during waking hours, you're looking at 2 5-second dropouts every hour, which is going to suck. I had a bad connection because of bad coax cable, and it's infuriating because each dropout causes long delays while TCP recovers.

> Three nines is completely unacceptable Less than 9 hrs of downtime per year is unacceptable for consumer internet?

jedberg 3y ago

It is when you work from home.

dwheeler 3y ago
Often 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 ago
It 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 ago
I 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 ago
Generously, 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.

hedora 3y ago

Traditionally, it was unacceptable for landline service, since it's safety critical. (You need to be able to call 911.) I poked around to try to figure out what the current requirements are, and it looks like they've mostly been scrapped. "Central office backup power" is required, which matches my experience attempting to get terrestrial internet or cell service during power outages.

cogman10 3y ago

If we limit it to issues that the ISP owns, then I'd say yes. What does the ISP have that can cause 9 hours worth of outages throughout the year? The only thing I could think of is the ISP being targeted by a massive DDOS attack.

wmf 3y ago
It's easy to have a single outage over 9 hours if they wait 8 hours to send somebody out.
- cogman10 3y ago
  lol, well yes I guess :D. I guess I'm really just spoiled. In the last 10 years I think I've only really experienced like 1 or 2 outages caused by my current ISP and they were resolved within the hour. My assumption is that like most people, all the ISP equipment is buried so the only things that can really go wrong are either at the colo or the home (like a router that dies). Having a line cut is simply a hyper rare event. On the other hand, my overhead powerlines have caused most of my outages. An idiot crashing into the telephone poll has made my power less reliable than my internet.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    Having a line in the ground won't save you when there are wild backhoes in your biome.
tw04 3y ago
An ice storm taking down a utility pole will blow that out of the water for several years.
Johnny555 3y ago
What does the ISP have that can cause 9 hours worth of outages throughout the year They have the real world -- ice storms, trees blown down by wind storms, power outages, backhoe outages, etc. A tree took out internet in my neighborhood for 2 days, others had longer outages since it was a big storm and it took a while to repair.

dghlsakjg 3y ago

I live in semi-rural Canada and get better service than that, but I would be fine with more downtime. OTOH, I frequently have scheduled power outage times that exceed that metric so it sort of doesn't matter, and that's ignoring unscheduled power outages (a necessary part of life in a temperate rain forest with above ground power). I've taken to keeping a small generator handy to power the modem.

hedora 3y ago
Our Internet + phone service go down if there's a power outage, which implies the cell network also goes down in practice. The tower might be up and on backup power, but it either has nothing to talk to or it's completely overwhelmed.

sib 3y ago

Yes, given that that's also the phone line for many people and therefore is an emergency service...

r1ch 3y ago

Imagine all your streaming video or calls froze for a few seconds every hour for days on end. 9 hours in one continuous outage is fine, constant short outages are infuriating.

prirun 3y ago

Depends on how the 9 hrs of downtime is distributed. It could be 6480 5-second outages (packet loss). There are 3650 10-hour workdays in a year. If those 6480 5-second dropouts occur during waking hours, you're looking at 2 5-second dropouts every hour, which is going to suck. I had a bad connection because of bad coax cable, and it's infuriating because each dropout causes long delays while TCP recovers.