Houston isn’t the only place in Texas having trouble. Spectrum Internet is down all across Texas. Including here. I’m typing this on my iPhone.
They’re not sure if it’s from Beryl or not, but it didn’t go out here until after noon today, and if a Houston power outage is affecting service in the entire state, that’s pretty poor disaster planning by Spectrum.
Will update when I know more.
Update: Back up here at 4:49 PM.
Update 2: All four lights are on but The Internet isn’t showering my screens with any bits. Those 30 minutes of Internet were useful while they lasted…
Update 3: Give them credit: They said by 7 PM, and it came on only a few minutes after that.
Supposedly a Spectrum tower in Houston that was damaged by Beryl was the root of a problem, but that seems suspicious. How can a single tower in Houston take out Internet in Austin and San Antonio? If true, this would be a whole lot of failover plans failed to switch over properly. Where’s the emergency redundancy?
Tags: Austin, Internet, Spectrum, technology, Texas
Current ETA up here in Round Rock is “We’re working quickly and expect to restore your service by 7:00 PM CT on July 9.”
Glad they specified the date, but I’m guessing that’s a rolling target.
“We’re working quickly and expect to restore your service by 10:00 PM CT on July 9.”
At least it’s still July 9.
Sadly, there are probably not as many failover plans in place as you think there should be.
A guy with a backhoe dug up a cable and took out 911 service for 4 states in April. 911 service.
System design is expensive. Redundancy is expensive. Mean-time-to-failure and mean-time-to-repair are statistics, which are math, and as we all know, Math is Hard. And you IT folks always want to spend money on something. Everything is just fine.
T-Mobile had some issues overnight (8-9 July) as well, at least with cellular phone and data service, and maybe just in Brazos county.
I’d been on wifi all day, so I noticed it around 10:30 pm on 8 July when I got to work (no wifi in the parking lot). It finally came back up around 8:30 am on 9 July.
My son has Spectrum internet service at his Dallas apartment, and it was down for nearly a week well before Hurricane Beryl arrived on shore. I think they either have infrastructure problems or their checks to their providers are bouncing.
Another ad for Starlink.
Possible answer: perhaps this tower was a peering point.
(where “tower” isn’t anything like a cell phone tower, but more like a midrise building chock-a-block full of telco hub infrastructure)
Tagging onto what Eric said, I wonder if Starlink has a plan whereby you get your dish, but only use it as-needed (i.e. during disasters). Pay-as-you-go. That way you keep your normal connection, and when things get dicey you switch over to the satellites. But you get the benefit of not paying Starlink’s normal monthly fee.