Last week the Associated Press reported on AT&T’s 4-hour DSL outage which impacted their customers across the Southeast on December 3. We don’t usually use this forum to discuss our competitors’ network outages. An outage can happen to an telecommunications company for a variety reasons ranging from simple human error to technological failings and natural disasters.

What brings us to mention this on Digitalstraighttalk.com are reported comments made by Dave Burstein, editor of the industry newsletter DSL Prime who said that broadband outages are not unusual. He is quoted, "Broadband goes down much more often than telephone lines because they didn't build the system for the same level of reliability. We do not know how often it happens, however, because they're not obligated to report it."

It’s unfortunate that Mr. Burstein was not more specific in his commentary about broadband reliability since broadband has become a generic term used to refer to high-speed Internet services delivered by both cable and telephone company ISPs (telcos in most instances providing said services via DSL).

At Cox we have a converged network platform, delivering all services (video, voice and data) over a single broadband hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) infrastructure. We deliver extremely high network availability and reliability for all services. Besides delivering video and Internet services that are virtually always on, our network successfully traffics 50,000,000 voice calls per day. As Cox moved from being a single-service telephone company into a multi-service telecommunications and entertainment company, we worked hard to deliver the lifeline reliability that consumers had grown to expect in their telephone service. Future discussions of broadband networks should be specific to architecture and reflect an awareness that no two ISP networks are exactly the same.