[sf-lug] Why I'm not a huge Comcast fan (2015 incident)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ken Shaffer (kenshaffer80 at gmail.com):

> Cellular phones make landline phone service irrelevant these days
> [...]

People in the large areas of California affected by the recent
fire-safety power shutdown found a couple of discomfiting things:

1.  In most cases, their mobile telephone service didn't work, because
the cellular towers almost never have battery backup present.

2.  Their other Internet service went down for lack of power.

3.  And only the relative few still having a hard landline and an 
old-style no-wall-power-needed voice telephone could even in theory call
911, or a neighbour, or anyone at all.

At Chez Moen, we make sure we keep a hard landline and at least one
plain ol' phone dependent on neither AC power nor batteries (e.g., not a
cordless unit).  Because all eggs in one basket makes us a little nervous.

For the same reason, I'm a little leery of do-it-all fibre optic
solutions.  Notice that, in the 2015 incident described, the only way we
could open a trouble ticket to get AT&T to diagnose and fix the broken
landline (after the O.C. Communications guy snipped all the cables 
at the edge of my roof) was Deirdre opening their service Web site over
mobile bandwidth.  So, I'm not over-thrilled with adopting a fibre
solution that gobbles up voice-telephone service and combines it with 
Internet data service.  Too egg-baskety.

(On the other hand, one fewer vendor to pay.  I'm not saying it's evil,
just concerning in some aspects.)