Comcast’s VoIP Plans & Outage nightmare

Om Malik | Wednesday, April 13, 2005 | 8:25 PM PT | 11 comments

Associated Press reports that Comcast will roll out its VoIP service in Boston and Hartford next month. The two metros are part of the 20 city roll-out Comcast has planned for 2005. Comcast chairman and chief executive Brian L. Roberts made the announcement at a Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce breakfast. At present Comcast is offering its service in Springfield and outlying western Massachusetts communities, Indianapolis, and its home base in Philadelphia. No idea how the service is doing but if they keep having network outages like they are having on their broadband network, well they can’t really convince too many people to sign-up

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June 24th, 2005
8:13 PM PT
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10 comments so far

April 14th, 2005
6:30 AM PT
Parkite said:

Comcast had another outage last night due to problems with their domain name servers………the third in a week. These outages have been occuring during peak usage (in the evening) so this has been effecting a lot of people.

April 14th, 2005
7:30 AM PT
Om Malik said:

which areas have been impacted this time around? any clues?

April 14th, 2005
8:07 AM PT
Josh said:

I too have had my web access limited by Comcast problems over the past few weeks. However, I doubt these issues affect VoIP (digital phone) service. The problems I have seen relate to DNS issues and do not hinder non-web applications, like my stock trading platform.

April 14th, 2005
8:29 AM PT
Om Malik said:

oh that’s good to know. this was coming and carriers aren’t just prepared for it - sucks

April 14th, 2005
10:06 AM PT
Charlie Sierra said:

I can confirm that Comcast’s DNS was kaput last night also.

Since I’ve already concluded that comcast IP folks are morons, what I do is keep a list of additional non-comcast DNS servers. If you have other ISP accounts you can use the other DNS servers, when you main ones go down.

In fact many folks I know do this for their laptops. If you can get an DHCP IP from a WiFi hotspot, you don’t have to use their DNS servers.

Moral of this story is that the level of service is crap.

April 14th, 2005
10:40 AM PT
Parkite said:

I feel like I am dealing with a small rurual ISP that doesn’t have the resources to maintain their network. I didn’t expect this from Comcast, but they are my only choice for broadband. They do, however, answer their phones within 5 minutes……problem is the CSRs don’t know anything.

April 14th, 2005
1:58 PM PT
Om Malik said:

Agreed… you should see what charlie has to say. charlie any chance you email me a quick how to to post for people who are having trouble with comcast DNS servers?

April 14th, 2005
3:45 PM PT
Clint Sharp said:

Actually, I was thinking about sending you an email about these issues, because I was surprised you hadn’t covered it. The problem with using other people’s DNS servers is that, while it’ll work, I don’t think anyone such as you, Om, could publically recommend any other providers DNS servers to Comcast subscribers. There’s nothing that says you can’t use any public DNS server to resolve requests as your primary DNS server, but it’s a shady practice to do so. However, I think a major issue was that Comcast didn’t have any backup servers to recommend to users in case of an outage. This is a simple solution that they could have easily provided instructions for on their website, and this is what I did to alleviate my problem.

As a response to Josh, yes it does affect voip service. Unless the ATAs are set to open their connections to a specific IP, which is dangerous seeing as it’s as lot easier to change DNS when you need to move a machine than the flash configs of several thousand ATAs, then DNS failures mean that when it comes time to initiate a connection to the SIP server, it will fail. For instance, during these problems, my Vonage service was out. It wasn’t easily possible on my Dlink router to manually specify DNS servers and maintain DHCP for obtaining the IP, unfortunately, so I manually specified DNS servers on the PCs only to workaround the issue.

April 14th, 2005
6:07 PM PT
Om Malik said:

clint, thanks for the reminder that i am remiss in blogging duties. i just have been swamped with work, and we were closing out issue at business 2.0 which is when i get a tad crazy. on top of that tons of meetings, so have not had a chance to basically blog. still the two day slowdown has pushed me way back. hopefully by end of the weekend i will regain the charge.

April 15th, 2005
8:30 AM PT
Sunil Chhaya said:

Does anyone know how to point to another DNS server? I do connect to T-Mobile hotspot every once in a while

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