Comments on: Comcast’s VoIP Plans & Outage nightmare

By: betting

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By: Sunil Chhaya

Sunil Chhaya — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 16:30:19 +0000

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

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 02:07:26 +0000

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.

By: Clint Sharp

Clint Sharp — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 23:45:47 +0000

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.

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 21:58:03 +0000

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?

By: Parkite

Parkite — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 18:40:54 +0000

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.

By: Charlie Sierra

Charlie Sierra — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 18:06:46 +0000

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.

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 16:29:02 +0000

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

By: Josh

Josh — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 16:07:45 +0000

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.

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 15:30:48 +0000

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

By: Parkite

Parkite — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 14:30:13 +0000

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.