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Verizon DSL dead in Boston area

By adamg on Mon, 05/09/2011 - 11:08pm

UPDATE: Four minutes after I posted this, from my phone, the service was back up.

Hey, these things happen. But it would be nice if the network techs would tell the support techs so they and customers wouldn't waste amazing amounts of time going through fruitless exercises like rebooting modems and running line diagnostics.

Not that I'm bitter after 40 minutes online and on the phone with support. Julia Rappaport says she spent two hours on hold and the 45 minutes on the line with a tech. Outage reports come from Roslindale, the Back Bay, Cambridge and Ward 2 in Somerville. Other parts of Somerville, Quincy and Salem report no problems.

Neighborhoods: 
Boston
Topics: 
Technology
Free tagging: 
Verizon


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Comments

By Where's the E-line on Mon, 05/09/2011 - 11:19pm.

Autocorrect FTL: Quick = Quincy?

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By adamg on Tue, 05/10/2011 - 12:41am.

Darn auto correct.

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By Ron Newman on Mon, 05/09/2011 - 11:22pm.

causing me to have to hop onto an unwitting neighbor's WiFi to use his or her RCN connection. I have no idea whether my DSL problem was related to yours. I'm in Davis Square (Ward 6), Somerville.

And by the way, Julie seems to have deleted the blog post that you linked to.

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By adamg on Tue, 05/10/2011 - 12:39am.

I typoed her URL. Fixed now.

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By An0n on Tue, 05/10/2011 - 6:35am.

You are such a space cadet. It is actually worrisome.

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By adamg on Tue, 05/10/2011 - 8:00am.

Especially because I'm obviously the only person on the planet with auto-correct issues.

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By anon on Mon, 05/09/2011 - 11:28pm.

I hate spending that much time on the lime.

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By anon on Tue, 05/10/2011 - 8:01am.

To me, their service sounds more like a lemon

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By adamg on Tue, 05/10/2011 - 8:08am.

Wish I could blame that on auto correct, but no, that's due to me refusing to admit defeat and turn the phone sideways for the larger virtual keyboard.

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By anon on Tue, 05/10/2011 - 11:10am.

Damn now I'M the one who looks like I can't type.

Speaking of autocorrect, one of the funniest I heard was a guy who texted his son "Your mom and I are going to Disney next month" and the phone changed Disney to divorce.

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By Mick T. on Mon, 05/09/2011 - 11:35pm.

It's been working here in Back Bay (near Mass Ave) all evening, however it's been a tad slow.

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By anon on Tue, 05/10/2011 - 12:44am.

n/t

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By cdevers on Tue, 05/10/2011 - 2:30am.

According to Verizon's support (Google cache), their recommended DNS servers are 206.124.64.253 ("64") and 206.124.65.253 ("65").

As of when people were reporting this, both servers were up & responding to basic ping tests, but DNS couldn't be reached at the 64 server:


$ telnet 206.124.64.253 domain
Trying 206.124.64.253...
^C

But the backup 65 server worked fine:


$ telnet 206.124.65.253 domain
Trying 206.124.65.253...
Connected to boingo.gte.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
^C^]

Which is to say, any time you want to figure out how to get to, say, cnn.com, your computer talks to one of those servers and is told that cnn.com is at 157.166.255.18 (et al), and the computer can then work out how to access it.

My DSL in Somerville never "went out", but I use Google's public DNS servers 8.8.8.8 & 8.8.4.4. If I was using the Verizon DNS server, I could have reached CNN at http://157.166.255.18, but I would not have been able to do http://cnn.com.

The lesson: all computers let you set multiple DNS servers. Don't just leave the one from your ISP in there, include at least one or two public alternatives as well, just in case the ISP's server ever goes offline, which obviously happens occasionally — Comcast had the same problem a few months ago.

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By anon on Tue, 05/10/2011 - 7:59am.

Verizon's 4G wireless air cards went dead for 24 hours a few weeks ago. It has also been acting up periodically since then. IIt was only after I took the device to the Downtown Crossing Verizon store that I found this out. Even then not everyone there knew about the problem. Absolutely NO word from Verizon about this!!!! Thank God I have a $175.00 early termination fee!!

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By anon on Tue, 05/10/2011 - 11:38am.

At least four times per day. Router dials out, gets a connection, it works, then Verizon drops it. When I'm really lucky, it works for a whole weekend.

I much rather have DSL dropping daily rather than water or gas dropping daily.

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By Kevin on Sun, 05/15/2011 - 8:29am.

You mentioned that Quincy is not experiencing problems. I've been without dsl in Quincy since at least Thursday 5/12/11. I had to jump through those tech support hoops also and was finally told of an outage in my area. Funny thing is, a neighbor had already told me about it. This was the first thing I asked tech support about when I got on the phone and they basically ignored my question and proceeded to troubleshoot my hardware only to confirm this service outage 45 minutes later. Still no service as of Saturday 5/14/11 in Quincy.

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By anon on Mon, 06/27/2011 - 9:43pm.

I just spent 49 minutes holding for support that never came. Fortunatly I spent the time diagnosing my network from the gateway in. All I wanted was to just to ask "is it something with my account and if. not, what's wrong and how long". Hmm?! How much was that xfinity packadge deal again?

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By anon on Tue, 06/28/2011 - 10:43am.

Yet another anon - Also had outage last night, though it got better while I was on the phone with their tech. Then the system was down again this AM. Any one know if theres a good way to find out about or share info about outages?

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By Michael Kerpan on Tue, 06/28/2011 - 11:02am.

...from Verizon's to Google's -- and things _seem_ to be working better (generaly).

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