Well that was rough....

I like to think I've developed a thick skin in my advanced age. But the internet is a very complex service, and it's nothing short of a miracle that it works as well as it does. Recently we had a situation where a group of homes had their service quality affected due to a string of problems. First, a yahoo with a chainsaw was trimming branches and knicked the fiber serving a whole neighborhood and services like sewage treatment and cell towers.

Net253 was the first to notice the problem and we got KPUD out to fix the issue. It was a doozy. It took KPUD 18 hours of emergency overtime, a contractor on emergency pay to string a 1/4 mile of replacement fiber and KPUD spliced nearly 1000 fiber connections to properly restore service. That all went fine.

Unfortunately for us, the cabinet that was impacted received damage during the “button up” when KPUD finished that work. To be fair, they are human, and they literarily worked 12 hours straight from 5PM to 5AM to restore service after the replacement fiber was put on the poles.

The damage was insidious'; homes were online, but marginal. As the temperature started to swing more, the homes started to have more disruptions. We were able to detect poor optical power levels and got KPUD back out on Oct 17th to investigate.

KPUD located the damaged equipment and after replacement, the impacted homes immediately had perfect service again. I was pretty happy. One of our affected customers wrote me a note stating my service was terrible and he was sorry but he has to change providers. I know the customer is simply clueless and stuggling to control somethign he has no control of, but it still hurts.

So the next time your internet is flaky, give your ISP (even if it is Comcast) the benefit of the doubt, and a few days to react. Sometimes there is something physically wrong with just your service and it takes time for a very talented, diverse, multi-agency,team to figure out what the hell is wrong.

For better or worse, KPUD operates an open access network. They are the “network operator”; there are multiple ISPs serving internet to homes on the network. Since the system is not “closed” or “captive”, like Comcast or Centurylink or Time Warner or Cox, we the ISPs do not have all the insights that closed systems have. Closed system operators have full visibility of the network and the customers home router (all the way into the home, through the router) to look for defects. We don’t have that luxury in an open access environment. It is the only real drawback.