Although a rare occurrence, yesterday we lost AT&T Wireless service to our cell phones. This made me think about diversity of communications in the home.
Every time I go to pay our Comcast bill I am told that by adding telephone service (and more recently a home alarm system) I can “save money” over what I am paying for HDTV and Internet.
Every time, I say “NO”.
In the mail, we get a constant stream of ads for us to get UVERSE for our TV and Internet (we already have AT&T for our telephone services).
In the trash.
I do not purchase “bundles”, but, that feeling goes way back to when I was a working engineer designing large communication systems.
We always, always, picked what we thought was the best product for the task. Diversification.
We needed a gatekepeer….Radvision. We needed an MCU (multipoint control unit)….Accord or Codian. We needed H.323 video conferencing endpoints….Polycom or Tandberg.
My point is: We always took the “best of breed” and never, ever, put all of our eggs in one basket. We diversified our resources and communication networks.
Yesterday, at home, when AT&T Wireless went down in Tracy, CA we had redundancy through diversity. We had our old fashioned land-line telephone from, hmmm, AT&T, that worked just fine. Our Internet was still fine, from Comcast / Xfinity. Only our cell phone service was down (along with mobile data connectivity, texting, etc).
Using the Internet (from our laptops) we asked our Facebook friends if they had a problem…they did. Using our land-line we called a useless person at AT&T service support who said it was our phones. It was not. Then we called the AT&T phone store and they told us the wireless network was down in Tracy and Patterson. We ultimately just waited for AT&T Wireless to get their shit together and un-screw what they screwed up.
They did…..eventually.
Yesterday was not catastrophic…..just a reminder to diversify when possible or financially feasible. (And keep your land line telephone?!)
Diversity of YOUR communications could save you trouble in the future.
UPDATE July 15 2015: Communications is down again. Word is that a copper thief cut fiber in French Camp.
It is not just us who needs to diversify.
AT&T, Verizon, etc have you ever heard of designing a communication network that takes advantage of DIVERSITY and REDUNDANCY? Look it up!
TechyMike: Technology Made Easy 