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Comment by jdminhbg | Hacker News Reader

> Three nines is completely unacceptable

Less than 9 hrs of downtime per year is unacceptable for consumer internet?

Traditionally, it was unacceptable for landline service, since it's safety critical. (You need to be able to call 911.)

I poked around to try to figure out what the current requirements are, and it looks like they've mostly been scrapped. "Central office backup power" is required, which matches my experience attempting to get terrestrial internet or cell service during power outages.

If we limit it to issues that the ISP owns, then I'd say yes.

What does the ISP have that can cause 9 hours worth of outages throughout the year? The only thing I could think of is the ISP being targeted by a massive DDOS attack.

It's easy to have a single outage over 9 hours if they wait 8 hours to send somebody out.

lol, well yes I guess :D.

I guess I'm really just spoiled. In the last 10 years I think I've only really experienced like 1 or 2 outages caused by my current ISP and they were resolved within the hour. My assumption is that like most people, all the ISP equipment is buried so the only things that can really go wrong are either at the colo or the home (like a router that dies). Having a line cut is simply a hyper rare event.

On the other hand, my overhead powerlines have caused most of my outages. An idiot crashing into the telephone poll has made my power less reliable than my internet.

Having a line in the ground won't save you when there are wild backhoes in your biome.

An ice storm taking down a utility pole will blow that out of the water for several years.

What does the ISP have that can cause 9 hours worth of outages throughout the year

They have the real world -- ice storms, trees blown down by wind storms, power outages, backhoe outages, etc.

A tree took out internet in my neighborhood for 2 days, others had longer outages since it was a big storm and it took a while to repair.

Not every year, but Rogers in Canada managed to black itself out across digital TV, corp circuits, home internet, mobile, 3rd party internet providers that used their lines, their own employees, and cellular for the good part of a day (from like 5AM until midnight) nationwide.

Their CTO was on holiday and was unreachable because their phone went into SOS mode and they just assumed it was them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Rogers_Communications_out...

In 2021, their mobile network went down for like 9 hours: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/rogers-identifies-root-caus...

The Nashville AT&T explosion didn't take out the data lines, but took out the electric service. Then the gas company cutoff the gas lines so their backup generators couldn't run (wiki says it was due to fire/water damage, so maybe I have that part wrong). The facility didn't have roll-up generator connections, so they had to figure out how to wire them in at a big time cost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nashville_bombing

In 2003, the "Slammer" worm slowed down ISP's core routers (including Rogers' to the point of not working anymore) with the quantity of small packets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_Slammer

I live in semi-rural Canada and get better service than that, but I would be fine with more downtime.

OTOH, I frequently have scheduled power outage times that exceed that metric so it sort of doesn't matter, and that's ignoring unscheduled power outages (a necessary part of life in a temperate rain forest with above ground power). I've taken to keeping a small generator handy to power the modem.

Our Internet + phone service go down if there's a power outage, which implies the cell network also goes down in practice. The tower might be up and on backup power, but it either has nothing to talk to or it's completely overwhelmed.

It is when you work from home.

Often you can use cell phone or a coffee shop if it's say 2 days/year of internet downtime.

If you need it for an emergency call, you need higher reliability, but you can prioritize, and I don't know how common landlines are any more.

It is? 44 minutes outage per month is critical?

I doubt that's true for most jobs. But yes, there are jobs where it is, and some of us (e.g. me ;) are just finicky about network connectivity. In which case I highly recommend having a fallback connection, with a different modality than the main one. For most of us, that means LTE. Tethering is fine if you can live with <5 min outages, but sure, you can also do automated failover.

But it's not a level of service that I think is reasonable to expect from a single ISP connection. A single construction incident will burn the annual SLO budget, and there's nothing the provider can do about that.

(And of course, it'd still be nice if telcos ran their backends competently. Looking at you, AT&T)

I would be annoyed at losing a day or so of work, if the outage was all at once - but nine hours a year is tolerable. I wish my ISP was that reliable. Hell, I wish my power company was that reliable. Where I live it's common to have a number of outages longer than eight hours every year. Last year a moderate storm caused power outages for a couple of days in August affecting thousands.

Generously, if you work 2000 hrs/year, that's less than 25% of a year's total hours, so it's only 2 hrs of work downtime on average. If you need better connectivity than that, you should pay for a higher SLA or make sure you can tether a cell connection or something.

Yes, given that that's also the phone line for many people and therefore is an emergency service...

Depends on how the 9 hrs of downtime is distributed. It could be 6480 5-second outages (packet loss). There are 3650 10-hour workdays in a year. If those 6480 5-second dropouts occur during waking hours, you're looking at 2 5-second dropouts every hour, which is going to suck.

I had a bad connection because of bad coax cable, and it's infuriating because each dropout causes long delays while TCP recovers.

Imagine all your streaming video or calls froze for a few seconds every hour for days on end. 9 hours in one continuous outage is fine, constant short outages are infuriating.

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