Some interesting commentary here on Comcast’s DNS outage that was treated by the company as a general connectivity problem. Here is Irwin Lazar’s discussion regarding what Comcast had on their recently:

I was able to get back on the net by using Bluetooth dial-up networking from my PowerBook through my Cingular Treo 650. Once I got connected I went to Comcast’s support page and found that under the "Network Health" header, there was a terse statement stating that "All Internet Connectivity Was Down". Umm, no, just DNS was down. Reconfiguring my machines to use alternate DNS servers resolved the problem, though I suppose for the average user, DNS being down means that in effect, the Internet is down.

Of course having to use a bluetooth dial-up connection to see what the problem was and reconfiguring your devices to deal with this issue is something many of us tech-heads will naturally do. Are we making it too difficult for consumers to use technology? It’s bad enough when even a cable company can’t accurately tell the public what the problem is.

Lazar’s story starts with a link to Russell Shaw’s blog where he details problems with residential VoIP troubleshooting. These connectivity and other issues need to be solved. To all of you in the VoIP industry: please get your acts together. We need to make this stuff easy to use. We need to think like Apple, not like Linus (Torvalds that is).