[Wylug-discuss] Network outages, the wrong kind of snow

[Andrew 'Leny' Lindley]

Yep, that's why I said '_guidline_ costs' and '_more_ reliable' rather
than 'reliable.'  Obviously a Five Nines link would cost quite a bit
more than a mere 2 or 3 hundred notes a month.  :) The question with
these things is usually 'How much will it cost you if the link goes
down?' and work backwards from there to the limit of the implied
budget and your imagination.

Consider the marginal cost to me of not being able to use Netflix for
part of ~three evenings a month and what it would cost in losses to a
cinema which was to stream a live sports event to a paying audience
in their theatres on one of those nights.

So yes, at least two different cable bundles in the road to two
different exchanges, plus 3/4G SIMs for whatever flavour of the 2.5
national mast networks there's signal for, plus, around here, line of
sight microwave to Emley Moor and satellite are all things you _might_
do if there was the budget.  But as an illustration that increased
reliability has noticable cost in home user terms I think the A&A page
I linked is good enough.

Leny

From: Rob Speed <Rob.Speed at bbc.co.uk>
Subject: RE: [Wylug-discuss] Network outages, the wrong kind of snow
Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2016 19:39:07 +0000

> The thing is. It's all well and good bonding connections to the same ISP - they're very likely to be going to the same cabinet and then DSLAM (or UBR in the case of VM).
> Yes, you can always pop a dongle into a Firebox, I appreciate.
> 
> Would it not be more advantageous to get a second connection through a different provider (of a differing type - cable & xDSL) and handling traffic shaping locally.
> 
> 
> R.
> 
> 
> ________________________________________
> From: Wylug-discuss [wylug-discuss-bounces at wylug.org.uk] on behalf of Andrew 'Leny' Lindley [andrew at andrewlindley.co.uk]
> Sent: 03 February 2016 19:07
> To: wylug-discuss at wylug.org.uk
> Subject: Re: [Wylug-discuss] Network outages, the wrong kind of snow
> 
> From: Anne Wilson <cannewilson at googlemail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Wylug-discuss] Network outages, the wrong kind of snow
> Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2016 09:38:59 +0000
> 
>> On 03/02/2016 03:04, Andrew 'Leny' Lindley wrote:
>>> I had difficulties at that time.  But I'm on ADSL2+ (all copper to the
>>> exchange) which was doing one of it's periodic retrains of the line
>>> then.  It does these between 20:00 and 23:00 then again around 01:00
>>> several days a month.  I assume they're exchange maintenance slots.
>>>
>>> See this
>>>
>>> http://aaisp.net/broadband-office1.html
>>>
>>> For guidline costs for more reliable Internet.  "You get what you pay
>>> for" I'm afraid.
>>>>
>> Not directly relevant, since I'm not in Leeds and not online at that
>> time, however....
>>
>> My normally reliable FtC connection has been very flakey every time that
>> high winds and lashing rain occur - and at 800ft in the Pennines that
>> has been quite often lately.  I found it difficult to believe that the
>> weather could be causing it, but it has happened so often lately, in an
>> exact pattern, that I've come to accept it as true.
> 
> Mine isn't in sync with the weather and I'm with A&A so I get to see
> the line logs from the exchange in their control pages.  That's the
> advantage of the small number of additional pennies for 'the
> propeller heads ISP'  :).
> 
> Yours could be the copper between you and the cabinet.  Which you
> might be able to work out if your router &| modem has the right
> blinken lights (i.e. carrier / [V]DSL goes off).  However, it's also
> the case that more people stay in and so use the Internet more during
> bad weather.  So it might be something like your provider's contention
> at your exchange or e.g. they don't pay for decent network priority
> for your service in their backhaul provider's MPLS network zone.
> However, if it was this depending on your provider/exchange's customer
> demographic I'd expect you to also notice the problems on
> e.g. 'homework nights' sometimes (i.e. Sunday eve, end of school
> holidays) or e.g. odd Saturday afternoons when people are streaming
> sports coverage.
> 
> Leny
> 
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