SummaryYesterday (May 14th, 2014) Comcast in San Juan County sufferred 2 hard outages. The first was from about 3:30pm-4:15pm. The second was considerably longer lasting from about 5:40pm-9:10pm. Yesterday's total downtime was approximately 4 hours 15 minutes. This is following an outage back on March 17th that lasted from about 6:04am-9:10am (3 hrs, 6 mins). CauseRegarding the cause of yesterday's outage, this morning I was told by Mark Johnson (a local supervisor) that a piece of equipment in their Farmington infrastructure had failed. Business ImpactYesterday's outage affected many Impala Networks clients adversly. The hardest hit were our clients using business-critical cloud-based services. This included internet-based VoIP phone services, internet-based credit card terminals, and remote/VPN-based business software. We had customers calling us seeking an ETA, as well as any solution to help them regain some limited functionality. Some of these we were able to help and others simply had no alternative but to wait out the outage. Unfortunately some of these included restaurants and retail sales establishments where their critical business hours extend past 7pm each day. So the 2nd outage actually hurt them just as badly if not worse than the first. Overview of local ISPsOur customers who use Cedar Networks for their Internet service had no disruption yesterday. We also use Cedar Networks and were able to continue working productively while so many of our customers could not. Comcast has truly helped push Farmington's internet connectivity forward over the past few years, primarily by bringing much faster speeds at a very competitive price. This has prompted competitors like CenturyLink and CedarNetworks to step their game and increase their speeds at a competitive price as well. Unfortunately Comcast's reliability in San Juan County has not been stellar. The outages from March and yesterday will now leave Comcast with no better than 99.916% uptime in San Juan County for the year of 2014. This may seem high. But mid-day outages are not easily forgotten by customers. Cisco Systems and other industry leaders set the bar for network availability to 99.999% (a.k.a. "five 9s"). This is equivelant to 5 minutes downtime per year. Comparing Comcast's outages to Cedar Networks, just this year Comcast's downtime has been near equivelant of Cedar Networks aggregate downtime in San Juan County over the past 7 years. This is referring to the general service outages affecting the entire region, as opposed to individual line issues that may affect only 1 customer.
