Outages Plague DSL Providers Outages Plague DSL Providers Paul Jones
Digital subscriber line broadband access providers have come under fire recently for their response to a string of outages.
Both Covad Communications Inc. and Pacific Bell have faced a battery of DSL access issues as they aggressively deploy their broadband services. Their experiences are not much different from any other DSL reseller or access provider's.
Covad (COVD) has had three separate multi-hour outages in Los Angeles in the past month. In New York, there have been reports of multiple problems over a period of four days resulting in nearly 48 hours of downtime.
SBC Communications Inc. (SBC) subsidiary Pac Bell is still reeling from a DSL service disruption that shut down high-speed connections to Saratoga and up the Peninsula through San Francisco and into the North Bay of California. Although the actual trouble ticket reported that Pac Bell's DSL service outage lasted only eight hours last week, e-mail problems lingered for consumers who connected through its Pac Bell Internet unit.
