Witness the stupidity of moving all your data to "The Cloud."

pag's? honestly?

working down here on the waterfront

... and nine months later there was a baby boom.

I'm all for getting a new service provider in Seattle, but this is really a straw man argument for it. If a large fiber cable is cut, there's nothing Comcast can do until it was repaired. And it's exceedingly unlikely Comcast had anything to do with cutting it. It was probably some construction crew or someone digging where they shouldn't.

For that matter, even if there was a second service provider, they might be out as well. You see, fiber cables need to be laid in spaces where the city gives right of way for them to do so. For big fiber backbone cables, any new provider is going to be likely to use the same right of way as Comcast (if the infrastructure for laying a cable already exists on route A why make a new route B?). So someone digging into a cable might just break both cables instead of one.

Working in Beacon HIll too. Not necessarily a fan of Comcast, but if we had municipal broadband and a cable went out like this, there would still be an outage, right? Or is the assumption that a municipal system would include more redundancies to protect against this??

I guess if there was more competition, Comcast (or whoever) would take more precautions to prevent this kind of thing.

@j-lon No you're right, a municipal broadband provider would be just as likely to have a cable cut.

There are tons of legitimate arguments to make about Comcast. This isn't one of them. It makes the Stranger look shrill and stupid.

@mattymatt

That's unlikely. These kinds of outages are nearly always caused by someone digging where they shouldn't. There's not much you can do to control that.

Dammit! How am I going to have a Silly Cat Video marathon tonight on Youtube if the Interweb is on the fritz? Plans dashed, evening shattered!

No fan of Comcast here, either - but the inability to use a credit card to buy a slice of pizza really isn't a problem to cry over

@1 FTW. Even though I didn't lose connectivity (sometimes CenturyLink is actually worth it), I'd still have my Galaxy as a back up; wouldn't get much work done, mind you, but at least I could still access email and stupid human videos on teh Interwebs.

As arbeck @5 and Arsfrisco @13 suggest, this seems like it's more an illustration of the way that changes in the architecture of the network -- from a mesh toward a hub-and-spoke structure -- are problematic, than anything to do with Comcast in particular. Even if we had a bunch of mini ISPs, or a municipal network, unless our infrastructure planners get serious about laying a LOT more cables -- enough that there's room for alternate routes to pick up traffic if one route gets cut -- this kind of thing is always going to be a problem.