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Why 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

Why 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 ago
Actually 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 ago
4 nines is reasonable, 5 nines a good target. ISPs have become utilities, especially since covid.
- uxp100 3y ago
  My electrical utility does not hit 4 nines, maybe not even 3. Water and sewer? Definitely.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I 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 ago
    5 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.
    - nucleardog 3y ago
      Hey, 3 nines ain’t too bad! In 2023 our availability only had one nine. We had power ~96% of the year. And it wasn’t like it was a lot of hour long outages that added up or something. Longest was 8 days. I am not in a dense urban area, but I am connected directly to a line connecting a couple of larger towns along a major highway, so we’re generally restored fairly quickly. During the 8 day outage, quite a few people in the major city nearby were actually still without power when mine was restored. Maybe unsurprisingly, my internet has actually been vastly _more_ reliable.
      - fy20 3y ago
        That's sounds pretty terrible... In my Eastern European country the SLA from the (state owned) power company is no more than 6 hours of down time per event, after which they need to pay compensation. Within highly populated areas it's shorter. Admitidely the most remote place is less than 1.5 hours from the nearest reasonable sized town, so we aren't as remote as some parts of the US. The purpose of this was to force them to make their network more reliable by upgrading old equipment, burying overhead lines (lots of trees used to fall on lines during winter) and ensuring redundancy.
  - maxerickson 3y ago
    If they have to do maintenance on a water main, you'll easily get an hour of downtime, likely followed by a boil water advisory. They replaced several hydrants near me a couple years ago and there were disruptions on a couple of days.
- mysteria 3y ago
  The commercial internet services with 4 or 5 9 SLAs have multiple redundant lines to the building to guarantee this and they charge handsomely for it. Otherwise a downed telephone pole or something will automatically bring the service down for a day or more. BTW I run a serious network at home (Proxmox cluster, all enterprise gear, virtualized router with HA, UPS power) and only target 4 nines on the LAN. System updates and things like server crashes making the router failover to another node cause around 30 minutes worth of network downtime a year. If a core or floor switch fails it'll automatically take me over an hour to swap in a spare and configure it. I don't bother trying for that fifth nine and I'm a very demanding user. Now if one of you have a consistent 5 nine home system I'd be curious to learn more about it. I'm guessing that would practically be a datacenter setup with CARP, dual switches, etc. - or you're just really really lucky.
dietr1ch 3y ago
Dude, my DSL back in my second world country fared better. The US has enough money to have moderate standards
- Johnny555 3y ago
  The DSL network piggybacked on the analog voice network which, at least in this country, was built to a higher standard. But I don't want to go back to the days of the 1990's where I was paying $40/month (around $100/month in today's dollars) for an analog phone line. It was reliable, so reliable that "as reliable as dial tone" was something to aspire to, but also costly and limited in capability. Even if I could get DSL today, my fastest speed would top out around 12mbit/sec due to my distance to the CO, which doesn't even meet the current definition of broadband.
fbdab103 3y ago
The average US customer in 2022 averaged 5.5 hours of power disruptions[0]. So somewhere between 3-4 9s. [0] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61303 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61303

Retric 3y ago

Actually 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 ago

4 nines is reasonable, 5 nines a good target. ISPs have become utilities, especially since covid.

uxp100 3y ago
My electrical utility does not hit 4 nines, maybe not even 3. Water and sewer? Definitely.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I 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 ago
  5 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.
  - nucleardog 3y ago
    Hey, 3 nines ain’t too bad! In 2023 our availability only had one nine. We had power ~96% of the year. And it wasn’t like it was a lot of hour long outages that added up or something. Longest was 8 days. I am not in a dense urban area, but I am connected directly to a line connecting a couple of larger towns along a major highway, so we’re generally restored fairly quickly. During the 8 day outage, quite a few people in the major city nearby were actually still without power when mine was restored. Maybe unsurprisingly, my internet has actually been vastly _more_ reliable.
    - fy20 3y ago
      That's sounds pretty terrible... In my Eastern European country the SLA from the (state owned) power company is no more than 6 hours of down time per event, after which they need to pay compensation. Within highly populated areas it's shorter. Admitidely the most remote place is less than 1.5 hours from the nearest reasonable sized town, so we aren't as remote as some parts of the US. The purpose of this was to force them to make their network more reliable by upgrading old equipment, burying overhead lines (lots of trees used to fall on lines during winter) and ensuring redundancy.
- maxerickson 3y ago
  If they have to do maintenance on a water main, you'll easily get an hour of downtime, likely followed by a boil water advisory. They replaced several hydrants near me a couple years ago and there were disruptions on a couple of days.
mysteria 3y ago
The commercial internet services with 4 or 5 9 SLAs have multiple redundant lines to the building to guarantee this and they charge handsomely for it. Otherwise a downed telephone pole or something will automatically bring the service down for a day or more. BTW I run a serious network at home (Proxmox cluster, all enterprise gear, virtualized router with HA, UPS power) and only target 4 nines on the LAN. System updates and things like server crashes making the router failover to another node cause around 30 minutes worth of network downtime a year. If a core or floor switch fails it'll automatically take me over an hour to swap in a spare and configure it. I don't bother trying for that fifth nine and I'm a very demanding user. Now if one of you have a consistent 5 nine home system I'd be curious to learn more about it. I'm guessing that would practically be a datacenter setup with CARP, dual switches, etc. - or you're just really really lucky.

dietr1ch 3y ago

Dude, my DSL back in my second world country fared better. The US has enough money to have moderate standards

Johnny555 3y ago
The DSL network piggybacked on the analog voice network which, at least in this country, was built to a higher standard. But I don't want to go back to the days of the 1990's where I was paying $40/month (around $100/month in today's dollars) for an analog phone line. It was reliable, so reliable that "as reliable as dial tone" was something to aspire to, but also costly and limited in capability. Even if I could get DSL today, my fastest speed would top out around 12mbit/sec due to my distance to the CO, which doesn't even meet the current definition of broadband.

fbdab103 3y ago

The average US customer in 2022 averaged 5.5 hours of power disruptions[0]. So somewhere between 3-4 9s. [0] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61303 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61303