So I woke up this morning to discover my business FIOS had croaked about
3:30 AM :(. Everything looked good on the ONT, but couldn't ping the
gateway. Poked at it from the other side, and it looked like traceroute
died a hop or so short of what I remember, so seemed to be a layer 3
issue on their side. Called support, killed an hour going through the
level 1 checklist (I suppose I understand why they have to do it, but it
doesn't make it any less frustrating to have to do the reset/power
cycle/cable reseat dance when you already know it's not going to change
a thing). Finally talked her into escalating the issue, and was told
there was a known outage in my area with reference #37202878, no cause
provided, and no ETA on resolution. Yay.
So I opened a chat session a little bit ago to see if I could get an
update on when my FIOS might come back. Of course the support tech
wanted to lead me through the dance again <sigh>, but I explained my
earlier conversation and asked him if he could just update me on the
outage. He said he had no record of that outage. I talked him into
escalating the issue again. He said his escalation engineer had never
heard of that outage or that reference number, and that everything
seemed fine with my FIOS, and I should just try resetting the ONT again
8-/.
So here I am, still with no FIOS, a general outage that may or may not
exist, and support techs with different stories :(. The last time I had
a problem like this my FIOS was down about three days, level 1 and level
2 support swore there was nothing wrong with it and had actually
scheduled a truck roll to replace my ONT, and it turned out to be an
accidental misconfiguration that took a while to resolve. I'm assuming
something similar happened again this time, same mysterious layer 3
breakage in the middle of the night, same claims by layer 1 and layer 2
support that there's nothing wrong, same obvious layer 3 functionality
issues. I'm guessing it will eventually just start working again.
Hopefully it won't be three days this time. If anybody in Frontier land
wants to throw a fellow network admin a bone and has any information on
this potential outage or when my FIOS might come back online I'd really
appreciate knowing :).
On another note, I was wondering if anybody has had their static FIOS IP
addresses migrated from Verizon space to Frontier space yet? Last April
they said they are going to do it by this April, which only leaves four
months. So far I haven't heard anything about it regarding my account.
Thanks…
Every time I’ve opened a FIOS ticket, Frontier can never find the ticket later. I even escalated all the way to the president of Frontier. Someone in his office took all my info and discussed the problems at length, and finally gave me something like a $150 credit.
Now I just pray it never goes down, because when it does, Frontier is not competent to solve the problem in anything like a timely fashion.
If a Frontier tech is on this list, I ask you kindly figure out what the blasted deal is with your vanishing ticket numbers. This has been going on for MONTHS!
-mel beckman
Well, my FIOS mysteriously came back online about 9:45pm, a bit over 18
hours after it mysteriously dropped offline. I happened to be in the
wiring closet staring angrily at the ONT about 8:30ish and noticed that
it reset itself 2 or 3 times over the course of about 10 minutes, so I
get the feeling somebody was fiddling with it remotely. I suppose I'll
never really know what was broken or how it ended up being fixed, other
than having about 100% certainty it was on the far side of the fiber.
It's understandable that equipment breaks, and people misconfigure
things sometimes. What I find insanely frustrating is the complete
disconnect between level 1/2 support and the network engineers that
actually know what's going on. When I called this morning with a
complete outage of my business class FIOS, somebody probably knew it was
down, or at least should have been able to tell it was down. But instead
I get to waste hours of my time going through meaningless
troubleshooting steps because lower level support doesn't have that
information. And then after actually getting an escalation to someone
who confirms an outage and gives me a ticket #, later follow up once
again yields a complete lack of knowledge of what's clearly an outage,
whether of just my connection or more widespread.
I'm about at the point where next time it goes down and it appears to be
a remote issue I'm not going to bother to call it in; I'll just cross my
fingers and hope it fixes itself within a day or so and only report it
if it doesn't. I don't think my calls today did anything but waste my
time.
The cynic in me wonders if somebody is trying to artificially inflate
their metrics ;). Problems? Who's having problems 8-/?
That's interesting though, I wonder if that's what happened to the
reference number I was given in the morning that was MIA in the
afternoon; it vanished into helpdesk limbo... At least my issue did get
somehow fixed so I won't have to call again tomorrow; ah, small favors :).
Whenever I call my local ISP with an issue I just make tier1 and tier2
dizzy so they escalate.
I solved this issue by making my own ISP.
I’ve been thinking of the same in my underserved area. Labor is $5/foot here and despite friends and colleagues telling me to move, it seems I have a sub-60 month ROI (and sub-year for some areas I’ve modeled with modest uptake rates of 15-20% where the other options are fixed wireless, Cellular data or dial).
Hope is to do a presentation in the fall or next year with progress. We have areas around here where Comcast, (AT&T or Frontier) don’t even serve. The municipality is off getting bids to build due to market failure by the incumbents to invest. municipal fiber is nigh on illegal here in Michigan but with no incumbent it is feasible and my hope is will lock out people who are unwilling to invest despite their market cap.
- Jared
Our model is 15k a mile all in, this is for aerial not underground for our HFC/Coax builds. A partner of ours models their underground fiber builds at 30k a mile.
This is in south Louisiana so your market may vary as always.
Luke Guillory
Network Operations Manager
Tel: 985.536.1212
Fax: 985.536.0300
Email: lguillory@reservetele.com
Reserve Telecommunications
100 RTC Dr
Reserve, LA 70084
Depending on the area and conditions (rock, etc). We're seeing
$4 /foot Aerial
$5-$7 /foot direct bury
$10 - $14 /foot directional bore
These are not including the fiber cable itself.
Even if nothing else happens, calling in and reporting the problem *does*
(or at least it *should*) set the clock running for any SLA-related compensation.
Last 18 hour outage I experienced got me a fantastic half month credit. It cost us more to pay me for the time I spent on hold than the credit was worth, so I no longer call them if we’re down and downdetector shows others in the area are too. We’re in the process of moving the circuit to a backup role, but it’s proving to be a long process getting fiber run to an alternative.
David
and think about it, you could get ipv6 on your network... the OP still
doesn't have that native on his fios I bet.
I'm a Frontier FiOS customer in SoCal and have had trouble loading the Google home page for weeks. Had trouble loading Gmail last night.
From: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu
Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2017 6:49 AM
Even if nothing else happens, calling in and reporting the problem *does*
(or at least it *should*) set the clock running for any SLA-related
compensation.
I'm pretty sure FIOS doesn't have any contractual SLA's. I suppose if you
call and whine enough you might get a billing credit, but as another poster
pointed out, it's generally not worth it.
From: Christopher Morrow
Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2017 8:42 AM
and think about it, you could get ipv6 on your network... the OP still
doesn't have that native on his fios I bet.
Yeah, sure, pour salt on my still open wound ;).
Have been evaluating going to more consumerish-grade circuits like this
at remote locations, but this scenario is one that has kept me sticking
with the more traditional (and more expensive) SLA-bound circuits.
Ray
From: Matthew Black
Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2017 9:41 AM
I'm a Frontier FiOS customer in SoCal and have had trouble loading the
Google home page for weeks. Had trouble loading Gmail last night.
When it's up, I rarely have connectivity issues. Of course, I have business
class fios and only use their pipe; I run my own DNS and other services, I
don't know specifically what is causing your issue.. In the eight months
since the cutover, I had some intermittent connectivity issues during the
week of the cutover itself, one three-day complete outage pretty much
identical to this 18 hour outage, and maybe two or three times I can recall
having issues getting to some piece of the Internet which may or may not
have been a Frontier problem.
I'd say overall I'm pretty happy with it when it's working. My main
complaint is that when it stops working I drop into a complete vacuum of
helplessness where I am unable to speak to anybody who can actually diagnose
and rectify whatever the underlying failure is which is preventing it from
working.
That and it's ridiculous not to have native IPv6 for business class Internet
at this point.
maybe now would be a good time to ask your vz rep about this 'feature'?
I'd call my business FIOS "prosumer" ;). Honestly, I'm not sure why
you'd get business FIOS over residential FIOS if you don't need static
IP addresses, at least if you're at an address where both are available.
I pay $125/month for 50/50 with 5 statics, which serves my household and
my IT consulting home office. I don't think my budget could cover "more
expensive" SLA-bound circuits :). I looked into whether I could get same
speed lower cost or higher speed same cost after the Frontier cutover,
but I'm afraid all I have to look forward to is same speed higher cost
when my current two year legacy Verizon contract expires :(.
Maybe I should move to Texas - Google business fiber 250/250 for
$100/month, with 13 statics for some additional cost I can't find
documented. Plus IPv6. Be nice to have some last mile competition around
here. LA is on their "some day" list, but who knows what that means
geographically plus they've pretty much stopped expanding and switched
to wireless 8-/.
Hah. I asked Frontier right after the cutover and got the same Verizon smoke
"Currently in the planning stages with no firm timeline for deployment."