A massive outage that TWC later said was the result of an infrastructure problem triggered during routine maintenance affected subscribers from the East Coast to Los Angeles, as shown by a map in which wide swaths of the country glowed a bright, troublesome red—a color that probably matched the faces of customers who tried calling customer service hotlines only to be met with a busy signal.
...outage brings up a point that hasn’t been talked about much in this debate: Physical infrastructure redundancy.
If TWC’s Internet infrastructure—the routers, switches and other physical stuff which help get Internet traffic into and out of your home—is added to Comcast’s, that would result in a pretty giant network. Therein lies a potential redundancy issue: If millions of post-merger subscribers are on the Comcast network and a catastrophic failure like Wednesday’s happens, millions more people would potentially be affected than would otherwise be the case. And in a post-merger world, those customers could wind up with fewer options for leaving Comcast if they got fed up with network issues, putting less competitive pressure on the company to address any network issues that arise.
Comcast’s network engineers are undoubtedly already thinking about this, but as the debate over the Comcast-TWC merger continues to heat up, expect this map to show up again — and sure enough, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday afternoon he’s ordered an investigation of the Time Warner Cable outage as part of a merger review.
“Dependable Internet service is a vital link in our daily lives and telecommunications companies have a responsibility to deliver reliable service to their customers,” Cuomo said.
posted by: gqjournal
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