[OT] Comcast phone service?

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Tom Metro <blu at vl.com> wrote a cautionary note:
> ...resiliency to power failure would only be
> as good as the local AC power and any possible backup batteries in the
> concentrator box.

I have one more cautionary note to add.  Last weekend my Internet service
started to get flaky; I assumed it was an overloaded DNS service somewhere
floating out in Comcast-land.

Then on Tuesday my service started to get seriously flaky, with the "cable"
light of my DOCSIS modem flickering out for a minute at a time.  I called in a
trouble report, and as the night passed (while I was on the phone with a tech,
in fact) sometime around 9pm the connection came back to normal (less than
0.1% packet loss to the nearest upstream router, measured overnight).

On Wednesday, just as the weather turned above freezing at noon, the
connection went down hard for 6 hours.  As the mercury dropped back to
freezing at 6pm, the connection came back and ran fine.  Until today at noon
when it went down again.

A tech came to the house today; I saw him replacing the line between my house
and the pole.  He had things running in about 40 minutes.  The explanation? 
Squirrels chewed through insulation at the pole side, letting water in and
causing the signal to degrade (not enough to affect CATV viewing).  Each time
the water froze, the signal improved just enough.

In all my years of managing Internet services, I never saw a failure quite
like this one!  I can see future calls to level-1 Comcast support:

  Hey Comcast, a squirrel ate my Internet!
  Uh, my Internet's frozen.  (Did you reboot Windows? ;-)
  Actually, it stops when it's thawed.

So--my cautionary note is that you want to have at least two ways of
communicating with the outside world.

:-)

-rich
P.S.  Are we experiencing some sort of solar flaring this winter?  I've had a
DLINK firewall keel over, I've had a Linksys 802.11g router kick it, and now
I've had a squirrel eat the cable.  I'm starting to think someone out there
wants me to settle down with a good book instead of using the 'net.