Broadband outage this morning 2012-12-11

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › Broadband outage this morning 2012-12-11

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#730405 11-Dec-2012 13:14

Zeon:

If internet is that important for your business why are you using a residential grade broadband service or at least have services on redundant delivery mediums (e.g. one DSL and one mobile broadband)?

I know many people/small busineses do, because they have got a 'home business' connection, which is basically a residential line but being marketed for business. But people doing that should at least have a mobile data backup to use for important emails etc, even with a full busioness connection in an office. I can confirm it went down about 1am this morning as I was working late and that is about when it stopped working. My concern is why it took them so long to be alerted of the problem, they are one of NZs biggest companies, so I would have thought they would have 24x7 monitoring, and real time status updates on their website, especially for major and widespread outages like this.

akia

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#730466 11-Dec-2012 14:11

Hi team - just to clarify. Here is the thread on who speaks for Telecom on these forums. http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=39&topicid=83675

And if we're speaking for ourselves we will put a disclaimer with "This is just my view but..."

Cheers,
Ams

kyhwana2

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#730470 11-Dec-2012 14:15

milli: I'm furious. My internet went down approx 1.30 am. I immediately got on the phone to faults and was hold for 40mins without getting through. Does everyone at Telecom go home at night? I run a business with most of my clients in America so often work through the night. I can't believe that our national carrier doesn't monitor their systems 24hrs a day. I wake to find that the fault was only acknowledged at 6am, hours after the problem started. I have a launch today, if Telecom doesn't get this fixed ASAP I will be changing to a different provider. /rant

Whats your SLA with Telecom?

cbrpilot

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#730638 11-Dec-2012 16:56

mattwnz:

My concern is why it took them so long to be alerted of the problem, they are one of NZs biggest companies, so I would have thought they would have 24x7 monitoring, and real time status updates on their website, especially for major and widespread outages like this.

Who says they do not have real time monitoring of their network?
Agreed on the fact the status updates to the Telecom website were too slow.

My views are my own, and may not necessarily represent those of my employer.

chevrolux

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#730668 11-Dec-2012 17:24

milli: I'm furious. My internet went down approx 1.30 am. I immediately got on the phone to faults and was hold for 40mins without getting through. Does everyone at Telecom go home at night? I run a business with most of my clients in America so often work through the night. I can't believe that our national carrier doesn't monitor their systems 24hrs a day. I wake to find that the fault was only acknowledged at 6am, hours after the problem started. I have a launch today, if Telecom doesn't get this fixed ASAP I will be changing to a different provider. /rant

This just makes me laugh... But also cringe a little due to knowing there are people out there who will moan there tits off when their best effort service is down and they have no backup.

Get a router with 3G failover.

milli

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Wannabe Geek

#730673 11-Dec-2012 17:31

Sheesh! Thank you to @wheelbarrow01, @JamesL, @freitasm, @Zeon, @bluestreak101 and @kyhwana2 for your comments.

Of course I have a backup to my broadband - how do you think I posted my first comment 3 hrs before my broadband was restored? Thing is - it's not particularly convenient or affordable to work using mobile data, especially when I needed to upload large video files.

I understand that sometimes things break - I've been in this business long enough to be understanding of that. My beef (as my first post clearly stated) was that I had spent 40+mins on the phone without getting through to anyone. I checked the Telecom site and the network status said everything was working. I checked Facebook and Twitter - nothing. That is very poor customer service as far as I'm concerned. Had I been able to get hold of someone or locate up to date network status info I wouldn't have stayed up until 2.30am trying to get an answer. I would have gotten more sleep and been less grumpy when I woke up to discover that info had only starting coming in from Telecom at 7am-ish.

My frustration was that it appeared that no-one was aware there was a problem nor was anyone answering the phone so that I could report it.

I don't expect a refund for the mobile data I had to use or anything like that - I'm aware that broadband isn't a guaranteed service. What I do expect is that Telecom provide adequate customer support and timely information to their customers.

I am astounded that PLANNED maintenance broke the Internet for half the country for approx 8hrs. Chorus needs to take a long hard look at itself. Is NZ a first world country or a technology backwater??

And yes, my comments are probably a bit over the top, and I probably should just walk away and not say anything, but I just really need to get this off my chest! It's been a long frustrating day after not much sleep.

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cbrpilot

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#730685 11-Dec-2012 17:46

I'm not sure how Chorus got painted with some of the blame here. My understanding is that this is solely a Telecom issue, and Chorus are not to blame in any way shape or form for this one.

Milli I think you can rest assured that Telecom treats this kind of issue VERY seriously and there will be a full investigation as to what happened and why, and how can they prevent this (particular issue) ever happening again.

My views are my own, and may not necessarily represent those of my employer.

mattwnz

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#730706 11-Dec-2012 18:12

cbrpilot:
mattwnz:

My concern is why it took them so long to be alerted of the problem, they are one of NZs biggest companies, so I would have thought they would have 24x7 monitoring, and real time status updates on their website, especially for major and widespread outages like this.

Who says they do not have real time monitoring of their network?
Agreed on the fact the status updates to the Telecom website were too slow.

They may, but it is not much use if it isn't communicated to the customers on their status page showing what services are up and down, and also on ther phone system. Obviously if there is no internet connection you can't check their website. It looks like their status page is manually updated by a person, rather than connected to their realtime status system. My modem shows realtime status, so you would think that it wou;dn't be hard to have a more elablorate system at their end of th network on their status page. Otherwise there is no real point in having a status page if it is not accurate. I don't think telecom are worse than other ISPs on this though, as some other ISPs I have used are also not good with their network status page updates.

Batman

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#730762 11-Dec-2012 19:27

well i guess there arent many NZers who've lived in other countries ... where broadband is an off and on luxury ;p

Stan

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#730839 11-Dec-2012 21:48

Anyone else offline again?

bobert

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#730843 11-Dec-2012 21:51

Stan: Anyone else offline again?

yep i'm offline again, back to mobile tethering again..

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Stan

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#730864 11-Dec-2012 21:59

Odd i have another friend in Hamilton who is online still on telecom guess we are just unlucky

plambrechtsen

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#730875 11-Dec-2012 22:03

Still trying to find out the story.

Have a nasty feeling it's the same issue as this morning as my home internet is borked again too.

Plus I have seen tweets from others with other ISPs who are having the same issue.

When I know more about an ETR I'll update you.