Some doofus (trying to be kind) who was camped out by the railroad tracks next to the Bend Parkway (nice, quiet spot - yeah right) caused a lot of people a lot of grief today.
He fell asleep with a lantern burning, and knocked it over, and started a fire, and tried to put it out, but he couldn't, so he called 911, and the fire got bad enough it burned some wires overhead - but not just any wires, but the freakin' BendBroadband fiber-optic wires, the ones made of glass, thin as a hair, that carry light (and a whole lot of data), and melt. And which it takes some specialized wiring to fix.
Soooo ... though BendBroadband says it only affected about 5,700 subscribers, I have a feeling a lot more of their almost-30,000 customers felt the pain, for several hours (here's my story about the mess). And most folks really don't have a backup for this stuff - it's cable-modem or nothin. (DSL customers today could chuckle and feel sorry, I suppose.)
It sure throws off the rhythm -- I didn't get to two things I wanted to cover today, and it took quite a while to catch up on e-mail, etc. I've already heard the city manager on the radio, saying he wants to make sure (the city also uses the cable system for Net-based phones!) they have redundancy, like Qwest created for its phone lines after several really dumb, really widespread outages.
But what's a home user (or home-office) user to do? We haven't had a "real modem" for a long, long time, and to have both DSL and the cable modem is ... well, ridiculous (and priced like that, too;-) BendBroadband does have a great service and a great up-time percentage, but when one has one's digital eggs all in one's basket, one would like that basket to be made of titanium alloy. (Though who could lift, or afford, that?;-)
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