AT&T and SLAs?

[goetsch]

We here in Humboldt County were offline for 17 hrs yesterday because of a cable cut on the line that parallels Hwy 101 near Hopland. In 2011, they strung a second fiber line along Hwy 36--partially funded by public money--to help keep us always connected. Turns out that yesterday AT&T only used this second line to keep local high rollers connected, while the rest of us twisted in the wind.

So here's my question: I'm not an AT&T customer; I'm a Sonic customer. Sonic is an AT&T customer. AT&T may have no SLA accountability to me, but what about to Sonic? You know AT&T is going to plead "out of our control" for the outage, but if they had capacity available and simply chose not to use it, is that not something under their control, for which they must take responsibility?

I know that a day down on a $40 a month contract is a trivial amount of money, but a lost day's worth of productivity--everybody in the house works online--is considerably more than that.

[Account]

That must have been extremely frustrating and a bit scary with parts of the 911 system not functioning properly. I am glad I was not a part of the outage. I am not sure that Sonic is really the people to be talking to. I think there must be agreements between Sonic and AT&T for them to use their fiber line but it wasn't just Sonic that was affected. Think about the other carriers that must be royally disappointed as well including Verizon (who is much bigger than Sonic). I don't think it is in AT&T's interest to allow this to happen again as not only did their system go down, they also had lots of negative attention.

There is some good news though. It looks like they have grabbed some congressional attention on this issue because of the 911 problems. Check out http://www.pressdemocrat.com/home/44298 ... sive-phone Senator Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg) commented that four different counties affected. Not sure if you saw the article at the pressdemocrat.com where they quoted McQuire as saying he was "was concerned that one damaged fiber optic cable could cause so much disruption for residents, businesses and other telecommunications companies."and "“I’m deeply concerned about how vulnerable the North Coast’s 911 system is. We’re going to get through this outage now, but we need a long-term fix to ensure that there is redundant 911 emergency phone service throughout California." Sounds like that's who you want to be speaking with. Can you believe that they left the cable uncovered? I don't like how much detail is in the article about where the fiber cable is and how far you have to dig to find it but that is the media for you.

"Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a phone call when you are unable to speak? " - Agent Smith

[dane]

We are working on a plan to bring redundancy to Sonic services on the North Coast region. Expected completion is roughly six months from now. Just hope we don't see another outage prior.

It's particularly frustrating that this wasn't a failure, it was sabotage. I believe it's the 11th incident now in a string of attacks. Details here: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015 ... vandalism/

[pmbell]

wow - this group or person is really getting around.

I completely agree with sabotage as the active term here. some of these cuts have reflected insider knowledge of the nodes attacked to target specific manholes where critical interties are in place.

I'm still scratching my head over the FBI claim that near simultaneous attacks on fiber in San Jose that caused broad outages and a sniper hitting transformers at a pg&e substation in the neighborhood were unrelated.