Another Single Point of Failure

I have talked before about single points of failure, but I experienced another one recently, when my Internet connection provided by AT&T failed.

It happened early this past Monday morning and so when I woke up to check in on the world and saw all kinds of error message in terms of the many communication tools I use I knew it was bad. I immediately grabbed the phone, since it uses the Vonage VOIP service, and since I was greeted with a recording instead of a dial tone, I knew the Internet connection was down and it wasn't just a problem with the PC I was using.

Heading downstairs to my data closet (yes I have a data closet in my house, more on that in another posting), expecting to see missing or red lights on the AT&T provided DSL modem, but everything looked fine.

As the AT&T tech support would tell you if you called them, I powered down the DSL modem, waited 30 seconds and powered it back up. All the lights came back to their normal status, but the Vonage device still showed no connection.

I then went through the normal other power recycle steps, starting with the Vonage device and then the router, DSL modem again and finally the Vonage device again. After rebooting one of my PCs just for grins and still having no connectivity I knew it was time to break down and call my ISP.

At this point I knew there was nothing more I could do at home, and running late, I headed to the office, figuring to call AT&T from there. My first call to AT&T was disappointing, after navigating through way too many automated prompts including providing a call back number (my cell phone) I finally reached a representative. We tried to discuss the issue, but she kept saying she was having trouble hearing me. OK, maybe we did have a bad connection (I could hear her just fine and I can't remember the last time my office phone had made a bad connection like the one she was claiming existed), but none the less, they had my call back number. But alas, no return call was made, so I went through the whole process again.

This time I reached a gentleman who validated my account status and tested connectivity to my DSL modem and said everything was fine. He suggested my router was the source of the problem, which while possible was unlikely, as it reported no errors and had gone through its own recycle.

At this point it was time to refocus on my corporate job and hope that things would clear themselves up.

Of course things did clear up a few hours later, not that AT&T will admit that anything was wrong or that they did anything, but magically my house got reconnected, it sent me a message a work (my house did, not AT&T).

This was a long story, hopefully worthwhile :), to talk about the fact that all the connectivity in the world at your house or small business is only as good as your ISP connection. So if the string between your two tin cans fails you will be living in a disconnected world.

In most cases it is hard to justify in the home or small business a second Internet connection, like my corporate office has, however depending on what you do and how much it will "cost" you to be disconnected it might make sense. If you can't justify the extra cost, at least plan for losing your connection on occasion (in the case of AT&T it has been rare) and know how you will operate without it.