Guess it was only a matter of time

I work from home, I guess I'll need a backup other than my phone for now


Metronet has been mostly unusable since noon today, finally called about 230 and they put an outage notice up

I asked what their expected resolution time was because I needed to know if I should make other arrangements for work. The tech didn't know, I asked for an active notification when the system was restored, they said they didn't have that capability. I told the tech thanks for your replies and I'm not disappointed with you but I am with metronet and would like to voice that complaint with them.

Just reaching out to voice my experience and ask for other's.

They did send a text at 5:35 saying there was an outage

Edit: I'm near midtown in Bryan

Edit 2: another notice now at 7:48, same as the first

I'm between midtown and university drive. I'm out and back on out and back on all day. I have received two text messages like yours.

I'm west of East 29th and south of Barak Ln and my Metronet VOIP phone and internet have been turning off and on since early afternoon. Disappointing.
I figure yesterday's slashing rain may be the culprit but I actually hope it's something else and a great rarity.

I'm hearing someone dug up some fiber somewhere

Just got a message saying everything should be restored, power cycle your equipment

FWIW, I had an outage a few months back and they gave me a small credit. Worth calling if it goes down again.

I had Metronet installed this morning actually and the technician was talking about the outage.. Is Metronet usually pretty reliable or does this happen often?

We've had them for over a year now and this is the first time this has happened.

Golf1 said:

---

I had Metronet installed this morning actually and the technician was talking about the outage.. Is Metronet usually pretty reliable or does this happen often?

---

Most utilities are "reliable" right up until someone severs the buried lines with an excavator.

lol, very true


yeah, they have been reliable


my only real gripe is because this is something i need for work, i need more clarity as to when it happened and the expected delay


If you know the fiber has been cut, you can estimate in hours time to find a crew and the scope of the repairs. Meanwhile i spent a lot of time troubleshooting my own gear when i should have changed locations or moved to a different option for connectivity.

I'm in Wheeler Ridge in Bryan, and Around noon on friday it started conking out for 60 seconds every 5 to 10 minutes... Rather inconvenient when working from home and on zoom meetings. I called in around 1:30pm and the support tech had me do all the usual litany of reset this reboot that but surprisingly he still said "hmm something's still not right..." and I was still on the phone with him when he said "Ah, I see, it just came up now that there's an outage in your area" around 2 pm. And that's when service cut out entirely. Half an hour later I got the first text about it.

By Friday evening, I got a followup text saying the issue was solved, but it most definitely still going. I've had to be on my phone hotspot all day today, which is far less than ideal because Wheeler Ridge is basically a dead zone to my carrier, and I am lucky to get 5mbit on my cell data.

That all said, until this, I'd actually been quite pleased with metronet. The speed is good, the ping is not the best but acceptable (because rather than going through a local colocation they trunked their fiber all the way back to their gateway in Chicago), but the only other outage I ever had was because the power company came by and literally, physically broke my fiber connection with their equipment. Metronet had a guy out the next day - and unlike suddenlink (which I had previous to Metronet) it was not a private contractor in an unmarked toyota camry with a cell phone app, it was a real technician with a Metronet branded van, and all the proper tools and equipment needed to get the issue resolved in less than 30 minutes from his arrival.

So yeah, I'm pretty unhappy right now, but I'll probably be sticking with them. Some drunk farmer with a backhoe probably sliced through aforementioned trunk to Chicago or something, and having had to work with fiber in my professional life, I know how time consuming it can be to fix a fiber break.