Re: [PLUG] T1 Connections..

["William H. Magill" <magill@isc.upenn.edu>]

>   * The DSL service itself is usually fine - I get great transfer speeds, on
>   the order of 620K on my 640K service. HOWEVER, it has a tendency to lose
>   connections (4 times in 22 days; my dial-up ISP didn't have that many
>   outages in 2 years!). 3 times the outages have been relatively short - 20
>   min or so. Once was like a whole day. No explanation/apology on Bell's part.
>   (You're zooming along fine. All of a sudden - no activity on the line. You
>   try to ping or traceroute; nothing happens. No return packets from the
>   traceroute at all; "Unknown host" messages on the ping. 15 minutes later -
>   everything is back as it should be)
>
>   Truly annoying, in the middle of a large download.
>
>   Pretty shitty infrastructure Bell has, if you ask me.
>

Bell Atlantic has had some very nasty ATM problems.

What does an ATM have to do with DSL you ask? 

Well ATM is not where they get money, it's Asynchronous Transfer mode.
It's the backend cloud that BA uses to route your "virtual circuit" from
the DSLAM (Digital Subscriber loop access module) in the CO to your ISP.

The ATM switch is from either Nortel or Fore, I forget which, and they
have had some significant software problems with the switches in the Phila
ATM cloud for about the past 2 months. 

There have been several Outages of multiple days, and multiple outages
of shorter duration. Each CO has its own switch and depending upon the
COs involved in your VPC (virtual private circuit) between your CO and your
ISP.

This is all good fun telecommunications stuff.

-- 
                        www.tru64unix.compaq.com
                              www.tru64.org
                             comp.unix.tru64
                        
T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill                          Senior Systems Administrator
Information Services and Computing (ISC)   University of Pennsylvania
Internet: magill@isc.upenn.edu             magill@acm.org
http://www.isc-net.upenn.edu/~magill/

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