Weeklong intermittent regional 911 outages -- I blame QUIC.

[Eric J Bowman <[e-mail]>]

My new GPON fails over to my old wireless, slated for gigabit WAVE upgrade later this year. For the past week, I'm down an average of 10 minutes every hour, on both, despite different backbone routing. When this happens, 911 goes "deee deeee deeee the # you have dialed has been disconnected or is no longer in service". Is this Verizon's fault? Well, yeah, it's their job, but the regional failure is impacting ATT and T-Mob as well.



I've tried WAVE, and found it has the same physical-layer intermittency-by-design (see beam-forming) as GPON, with about half the latency, which is still double what I have with my current wireless. So I know how well QUIC plays with the Internet when it isn't being used to avoid HOL blocking (in which case, no problemo). Because it assumes that establishing a tunnel is indicative of a consistent physical-layer connection.



Instead, all those little bits of JSON which result from web apps having tight-coupling worthy of an EPYC chip, incur a handshake which totally nullifies the benefit of "zero round trip" because I don't think the Internet works the way they think it does. When I see "QUIC is enhanced TCP" I laugh, it most certainly is NOT like TCP at all, because TCP isn't bothered one little bit by intermittency now, any more than it was when I bootstrapped my own rural ISP so I could have a POP to host a webserver to be a Web developer, after having downloaded Mosaic over a 2400-baud Compuserve connection, so I could provide intermittent connectivity via modem.



I opened 30 years ago, today. When 911 could always be counted on to work. Now, locals who need an ambulance know to call the Sheriff's Dept. # because that's all 911 is -- an alias for local EMS dispatch. Of course, it helps to have a land line, and it's interesting to note that GPON RJ-15 POTS service is unaffected (like it would be if it were VOIP). Because you can't use a cell phone to call 911 when it isn't working, because your phone will also not be working.



Because Memorial Day. Tourist influx. Now with more people sending more data up than ever. Using QUIC when it isn't necessary. We don't have enough cell towers to handle the load. The ones we have are shared by all. While I welcome everyone to visit Colorado, please do be careful this summer, because if you need an ambulance...



Well, we'll be fine here, because EMS IP fails over to two pairs of OST 56Kbps digital modems on the old microwave repeater towers, down to Denver. I turned them on 30 years ago, today. They've long since been relegated to standby, but my first POP was a rack in the County DC, and when 3com rug-pulled USRobot customers and my ISP career ended in disaster...



...don't worry, my SPARC webhosting empire would do well for several years until Oracle rug-pulled Open Solaris...



...so I donated my setup to EMS. The other end passed from Colorado Internet Cooperative Association to telco-direct, same rack. Those modems' routing has changed over time, but they've never powered down for so much as a second. One thing I know about, is the physical layer issues impacting rural America even more than the Third World. 128Kbps ftw! Took 30 years of involvement in local effort to bring fiber here.



But, we got had, in more ways than one (supposed to be a loop). Two years ago we were down for a couple days when a rancher backhoed through the backbone. Everyone blamed him. He said the utility locator guy told him he could dig there. So everyone blamed that guy. That guy said, I know my job, he dug where I told him the fiber wasn't. The contractor who laid it's long gone, so nobody knows where we're going to get the money to pull locator wire, because they only used it under roadways and nobody thought to check.



Anyway, QUIC is goshawfully bad at everything that isn't video streaming (audio will be shunted to the phone laser and capped at DSL), because I have to regain the focus and attention of the laser on the optical switch. It is not permanently tasked to me. My physical layer's fine, but that doesn't mean I have a tunnel.



TCP/IP - no problem

UDP/IP - hit or miss

SCTP/IP - there are two ways to handle TLS which I thought were a coin flip; only one plays friendly with GPON/beam-forming

QUIC/IP - fail. utter, total fail. Except for streaming.



But, what would I know about physical-layer IP networking.



-Eric