The big bundle, which turned out to be a big BUNGLE last Friday (7/22/11)… because ALL of the bundle just plain flat out quit. Now, this isn’t that big of a deal to people who just have their phone and TV, those who go to work at an office somewhere else outside of their small community… nope they can still work, call their boss, and get things done.

For me, not so much. The whole bundle stopped working at around 1am Friday morning, how do I know? Well, I wasn’t able to sleep and went out into my family room and tried to watch some cable TV…. it may have stopped working prior to that, but I’ll be satisfied with the 1am outtage time.  It seems that a construction company dug up the big old feed coax fiber cable that is our (Ramona, CA) digital artery!

So, no internet, Check. No Cable TV, Check. (That one’s not so bad, I’m a movie guy and have about 200+ movies available on our Sony DVD/Blu Ray 400 changer player) So, Watched some movies. And finally no phone. That’s a big problem, because our cell phones get NO service out here in the area we settled in.  I even wrote at least one post about that which you can read here. The Cell Phone booster from the Cell Phone Company Sprint relies on the fact that we have a broadband connection.  With that out, our Cell Phone Booster is Busted!

The big BUNDLE, it’s designed to save me money every month on the services I use. I depend heavily on them and when they go out for a half hour, or hour, it’s ok… I can handle that. But when it is off for nearly 24 hours and on a Friday yet… it really sucks.

I’m hoping that this is a rare occurance, or else I will need to be ordering a back up / Hot fail over solution. You know, get DSL service or something else, and pay out the nose for duplicating the service. What do I mean? Well, if I don’t need it every day it’s a waste of money in my opinion. The only time it could be worth it is if there were another series of extended outages. But if that started happening, I would start driving in to the office (a 45.1 mile one way trip).

This whole incident also made me think about how reliable that the upcoming offerings of different ‘cloud’ services would really be, I mean if you can’t get on the net, you can’t get inside the cloud….