VoIP Customer Support & Comcast Woes

Russell Shaw shares some user experiences in troubleshooting residential VoIP services. It isn't pretty.

This example underscores the strength that broadband providers should have in delivering VoIP services over the overlay providers such as AT&T and Vonage, who have no control over the network that they rely on for service delivery.

Speaking of the broadband service providers, Comcast (which I use for my cable modem service) has had two outages of its DNS servers in the last week. These are the first outages I've seen in well over a year of using the service. During each of these outages it was impossible to call Comcast, every-time I tried calling I received a fast-busy signal.

I was able to get back on the net by using Bluetooth dial-up networking from my PowerBook through my Cingular Treo 650. Once I got connected I went to Comcast's support page and found that under the "Network Health" header, there was a terse statement stating that "All Internet Connectivity Was Down". Umm, no, just DNS was down. Reconfiguring my machines to use alternate DNS servers resolved the problem, though I suppose for the average user, DNS being down means that in effect, the Internet is down.

Thank you to my colleague Dan Golding for pointing out that Apple Mac OS X comes with a built in DNS BIND server (thanks to its BSD UNIX underpinnings). All I needed to do was to fire up the server and point my DNS lookups to my own machine to get around Comcast's issues. Yet one more benefit of using a Mac. :-)

Comments

[Aswath]

In the airline industry, when one airline has trouble in serving a flight, the other airlines usually accommodate the stranded passengers. Likewise, couldn't Comcast have outsourced the DNS query functions to an alternate provider till they fix the problem?

[Irwin Lazar]

There's been a discussion about this on NANOG. They could either use an outsourced DNS service such as Nominum or UltraDNS, or if they want to be really seedy, they could have set up an anycast address that resolves to their own servers as well as those from other providers.

[Alok]

dont split the names and the numbers. make the $who = $where
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