Frontier Reporting Outages

Monday, July 7, 2020, there were reports of Frontier Reporting Outages across the United States by the internet service provider Frontier. According to downdetector.com (tracks outages) the cities of Anaheim, Riverside and Los Angeles here in California were the most affected along with some large out of state cities.

During this time when so many people are working from home, outages like these can be harmful to many businesses, as employees will be unable to complete much of their work.

While good business practices should include a plan for a backup internet service in most offices where internet is an essential part of their workflow, providing backup internet solutions for a large number of employees working from home can be difficult and expensive.

So, what can we learn from the Frontier Reporting Outages?
Furthermore, what can businesses do to protect themselves from uncontrolled outages.

1. Enroll in a program like the Unified Purchasing Group (UPG) where you can get discounts for your employees on their phone plan allowing them to add mobile hotspot to their plan to use as a backup internet connection.
2. Within your host servers, consider Installing a backup internet connection at the site where you’re hosting them to prevent downtime. If you can’t find another ISP in the area, you can invest in a hotspot/router with ethernet ports and a wireless 4G LTE connection like this Pepwave Max. When your primary internet connection goes down this router seamlessly fails over to the wireless connection keeping your devices connected. Keep in mind that a wireless plan is necessary. Further, this will help from the example we have learned from the Frontier Reporting Outages. 
3. Ensure that you’re using backup power supplies on your ISP equipment whenever possible. I’ve seen many instances where the ISP installs a backup battery pack (UPS) but fails to replace bad batteries and it’s not until you need it you realize it’s not working.

Day 2: Frontier Reporting Outages Continues…

Currently, a few businesses are still experiencing outages and internet disruptions. Click here for more on the Frontier Reporting Outages map and to read customer’s live comments and live tweets.

The second day in a row outage for Southern California residents and businesses in these listed cities:

• Los Angeles
• Chino
• Fontana
• Temecula

 If you’re still experiencing no internet here is a solution for you to get back to work in no time.

The last couple of day of ‘Frontier Reporting Outages‘ seems to be having some major DNS issues. After changing the DNS settings for a few of our customer’s firewalls, they were back up and running in a short period of time. Further, as there are so many routers in the market, we cannot include precise instructions on how to change your DNS settings. But, there are two places where this can be done:

1. Is on the individual devices.

By going to your network settings and changing your IPv4 settings to include a manually entered DNS. We recommend however the second route:

• Log into your router
• Find and change the DNS settings to use Google’s DNS server at 8.8.8.8 for your primary.
• and 8.8.4.4 for the secondary.

2. Or you can also use Cloudflare’s free DNS servers at 1.1.1.1 with Google’s 8.8.8.8 as a secondary. While there are other free DNS service providers, these are the two that I have used that work well.