adamj: C'est la vie. I'm sure they did the best they could given the circumstances.
Are you serious? 8 days to fix the problem is OK in your book? Dare I guess you weren't running a business there? And if my high school French serves me, "such is life".....ahhh, no I think most Telco's would disagree and say "such is bad investment and backup of records"
Yeah I am. Like someoe said, software faults are and always will be a fact of life. This is obviously not something Telecom was able to foresee and was a complicated issue to deal with. While it is an unfortunate situation for alot of people, I do thing Telecom generally takes all of the reasonable steps to ensure the network it up all of the time. E.g. You could spend $X finding 98% of the faults in a piece of software or business process, but it would probably cost $X times 10 to find 99% and $X to find 100% (And even then you'd probably miss something).
Obviously there is a lesson for Telecom here in terms of recovery strategies and backups etc but there is also an important lesson here for businesses and people who rely on the phones. I run a small business from home here in Wellington, and if my business landline (Now a VFX line) goes down I have things in place to deal with it as best as possible. (For example, automatic call forwarding if the line is down, mobile numbers listed in phonebook and on company website and on business cards etc.)
The guys from Downer did a great job, even coming into the shop to see us several times through the week to help us with enquiries from landline customers who were still down. (Thanks Dave!!!)
When we first went down, we had our aircard out and ready, only we didn't need it. We only use our cellphones to make outgoing calls, and if the lines had been down for longer, Mr Boss would have hired wireless eftpos somehow... I'm sure we could have organised something from e-pay too, for that matter.
Worst thing was the couple in the shop last friday, from Telstra - read my blog!
I have to work full-time this week, I am definitely getting too old for this... Hope we never have to go through this ever again.
adamj: C'est la vie. I'm sure they did the best they could given the circumstances.
Are you serious? 8 days to fix the problem is OK in your book? Dare I guess you weren't running a business there? And if my high school French serves me, "such is life".....ahhh, no I think most Telco's would disagree and say "such is bad investment and backup of records"
Yeah I am. Like someoe said, software faults are and always will be a fact of life. This is obviously not something Telecom was able to foresee and was a complicated issue to deal with. While it is an unfortunate situation for alot of people, I do thing Telecom generally takes all of the reasonable steps to ensure the network it up all of the time. E.g. You could spend $X finding 98% of the faults in a piece of software or business process, but it would probably cost $X times 10 to find 99% and $X to find 100% (And even then you'd probably miss something).
Obviously there is a lesson for Telecom here in terms of recovery strategies and backups etc but there is also an important lesson here for businesses and people who rely on the phones. I run a small business from home here in Wellington, and if my business landline (Now a VFX line) goes down I have things in place to deal with it as best as possible. (For example, automatic call forwarding if the line is down, mobile numbers listed in phonebook and on company website and on business cards etc.)
Adam, sorry we are going to have to disagree on this one. I accept that software faults happen and that you don't get warnings in many cases but to suggest that Telecom took all the reasonable steps in this case is ignoring the facts just a touch. Let me re-iterate, a restore from 2005 was used to get the exchange operational. As someone who is studying this general area at Uni have you been told that backups which are about 3 years old on a critical platform (yes critical, it runs the 111 service) would be considered reasonable?? If you have been then transfer to another Uni.
By the way, you should read the thread again also, the fault in the exchange meant no call forwarding was possible and people who were using services such as VFX were impacted as the porting (read call forwarding in telecom speak) also didn't work.
Look, don't get me wrong having worked in the industry for 12 years i am only too aware of how it can go pear-shaped quickly, but in this case I feel telecom need to stick their hand up and say "we did this poorly, our processes were not up to the mark and we got caught with our pants down"
pressF1: Adam, sorry we are going to have to disagree on this one. I accept that software faults happen and that you don't get warnings in many cases but to suggest that Telecom took all the reasonable steps in this case is ignoring the facts just a touch. Let me re-iterate, a restore from 2005 was used to get the exchange operational. As someone who is studying this general area at Uni have you been told that backups which are about 3 years old on a critical platform (yes critical, it runs the 111 service) would be considered reasonable?? If you have been then transfer to another Uni.
By the way, you should read the thread again also, the fault in the exchange meant no call forwarding was possible and people who were using services such as VFX were impacted as the porting (read call forwarding in telecom speak) also didn't work.
Look, don't get me wrong having worked in the industry for 12 years i am only too aware of how it can go pear-shaped quickly, but in this case I feel telecom need to stick their hand up and say "we did this poorly, our processes were not up to the mark and we got caught with our pants down"
Firstly, I have read the thread and I know about the issues it caused. That's why I mentioned that the cell numbers are published in the phone book, on our website and on business cards. The call forwarding is there in case we loose our net connection or if there is some other issue that affects our ability to recieve calls (Like a power outage) that is not routing related.
I'm not saying it is OK that Telecom have only a 3 year old backup, what I am saying is that given that they didn't have a recent backup, I really don't think they could have done any better (I'm at the other end of the island, but going from what I have read). When the s*%# hits the fan, they can only work with what they have, and given what they had at the time I don't think you can expect anything more. Like I said, lessons to be learned by both Telecom and the users. The benefit of hindsight.
I just skim read the thread and found people mentioning that pabx systems were going a bit faulty. Some people may be interested to know that many pabx units will listen when you make an outgoing call for a dial tone, as you are calling. If the pabx doesnt detect the dial tone, it will mark the trunk line as faulty and disable it untill the the system is reset. Once all the trunk lines are marked as disabled, you simply wouldnt be able to make any outgoing calls.
Also with those that were complaining about the loss of eftpos A few years ago when my mom started a cafe, one requirement for her to get eftpos was the fact she had to have a zip-zap on site and the carbon forms incase something like this were to happen. When I worked for The Warehouse in napier, we went through a period where the building was being rennovated - the buildings power supply would cut out and not start up again because of a fault in the ups. It happened over a period of a month quite a few times - the worst being a 4 hour period on a saturday cutting lighting and 99% of the stores power - making a couple of the first level departments completly pitch black with no lighting. The pabx would be cut but the ups was able to run a couple of tills on backup power during this time and the zip-zaps came in handy. In fact, every till has a zip-zap and an icecream container filled with the carbon forms.
adamj:I'm not saying it is OK that Telecom have only a 3 year old backup,
In all this thread it seems odd that there's been no mention that NEC NZ claim to be doing the operation and maintenance of the NEAX exchanges for Telecom. Is 2005 significant as it was the year another NZ company developed a replacement storage unit to replace the old tape backup system?
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