Telecom broadband down again 2012-12-11 21:45

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › Telecom broadband down again 2012-12-11 21:45

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276 posts

Ultimate Geek

#731311 12-Dec-2012 12:36

kiwirock:

I would probably do the same in your shoes. I'm in a place by myself so naked was the choice for me, and ended up Snap.

Telecom didn't offer it when I signed up over a year ago, shame they still don't. But I've been happy with Snap, I have Telecom 3G handy just incase, but the odd short problem was fixed pretty quick smart. All in all, I don't actually remember any problem if I had them, so they were nothing worth remembering. Only one, and that was my router's fault, and Snap knew the bug and had me on the right track in minutes.

Gav.

Thing is, when I was looking at prices, Telecom's lowest costing broadband package was only $75. Five dollars more than the SNAP package. But it only gave me 30GB and I didn't need a landline. I found it odd because I know Telecom has been upping the data for people on existing plans, why they haven't upped the data on that plan, not too sure. If it was 50GB it would have been a value add having that phone... but as it currently stands, I'd be paying for something I didn't use, and not getting enough of what I do use. :(

ANYWAY, GL to the Telecom crew. I'm sure they're doing everything they can. :)

Zeb A.
Twitter: @asgard

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kiwirock

660 posts

Ultimate Geek

#731321 12-Dec-2012 12:49

Asrafrate:

When I signed up I got it for $55, times have changed, but what sold me was flat-rate Youtube now $5 (used to be $2).

I read that charges to ISP's for DSL ports looked like they were going down the other week. Maybe (I doubt it) naked will get more interesting in the future. If naked would come down, I'd have two lines, the other with Telecom or HD.

I wish Naked was only $15 more than the price for the port, then pay per GB.

So is Telecom's woes over yet anyone?

mattgreen

133 posts

Master Geek

#731323 12-Dec-2012 12:54

bleater: What kind of cowboys plan and execute an upgrade live on a critical system with the ability to affect 300 000+ customers?! Contingency planning, backup systems, upgrading the system on shadowed data... there are many more strategies for doing this correctly. Two separate extended periods of downtime is a monumental cock-up in anyones' book, and unfortunately all too typical an outcome of the "she'll be right" slack attitude seen often here in NZ.

Are you saying AWS, Facebook and Google have the same slack "she'll be right" attitude as well? Their outages have affected 10's or 100's of millions of customers...

Things break in unexpected ways despite all the best people, architecture and change/release processes. When they break they often cause other secondary issues that are hard to design and plan for in advance.

bleater

57 posts

Master Geek

#731353 12-Dec-2012 13:12

Well, in this case, going by the scant information made public, this was caused by cascading effects of changes brought about by a "server upgrade", including the failure of a parallel system brought in to cover the load (so I guess we can assume that this system was not being upgraded at the same time). Some of the other large-scale failures we see in the news are vastly different issues. If your server farm gets struck by lightning and that takes out your cloud service, I don't rate that as human error or consequences of a slack approach to system management. Similarly, failure under load when systems with open registration grow massively in a short space of time (e.g. the twitter outages) are also a different issue. Suffering from a lax approach is hardly exclusively an NZ problem, but we do tend to invite it here by paying sh*t salaries right across the entire IT industry, which tends to drive the most technically competent people offshore.

mattgreen

133 posts

Master Geek

#731381 12-Dec-2012 13:38

bleater: Well, in this case, going by the scant information made public, this was caused by cascading effects of changes brought about by a "server upgrade", including the failure of a parallel system brought in to cover the load (so I guess we can assume that this system was not being upgraded at the same time). Some of the other large-scale failures we see in the news are vastly different issues. If your server farm gets struck by lightning and that takes out your cloud service, I don't rate that as human error or consequences of a slack approach to system management. Similarly, failure under load when systems with open registration grow massively in a short space of time (e.g. the twitter outages) are also a different issue. Suffering from a lax approach is hardly exclusively an NZ problem, but we do tend to invite it here by paying sh*t salaries right across the entire IT industry, which tends to drive the most technically competent people offshore.

AWS have had many outages unrelated to natural disasters. So have Facebook and Google. In fact most of them have been software related.

For example, Google's most recent outage (in the last few hours) was part of a routine upgrade. Sure it was shorter but it affected a hell of a lot more people. Hell it even crashed Chome.. They arguably have the top 0.1% of the brains in the entire industry and still dropped the ball.

I think you should cut the Telecom guys some slack here.

Also, NZ doesn't pay sh*t salaries across the board for IT people (relative to NZ wages). Go look at the huge number of 100k+ jobs in IT on Seek/Trademe compared to other professional roles.

While I won't argue the maturity could be higher within NZ IT practice I'd have to say your prejudice about the industry is misguided.

EDIT: Here's some details on a recent AWS outage that apparently took AWS engineers 5 whole hours to find the cause..

wasabi2k

2092 posts

Uber Geek

#731384 12-Dec-2012 13:43

Having been affected on Sunday (most of the day) when I really needed to dial into work, then the following morning and again last night I was pretty peeved, but at the end of the day there is no SLA.

It's a crappy situation, Telecom will more than likely give everyone a $20 discount or something. They will fix it and move on.

The details of what caused this will likely NEVER become public, certainly not from Telecom officially. Something suitably generic like "Server Upgrade gone wrong" will be fed to Computerworld. That's IT. Companies do not have a transparency clause for stuff like this.

As has been said, something went wrong, someone will get in trouble. There will be 200 page Incident Reports and review meetings. Not sure what Telecom culture is like but where I work someone will be blamed and be on the naughty list for a few weeks (or fired). Alternatively it could be a lessons learnt and move on with learnings exercise which is far more useful.

I hate to think what Telecom's Change control processes are but suspect they are heavy and stringent.

In summary - sh*t happens, Telecom will probably give you a token refund, life goes on.

If you are losing $1,000,000 an hour because your Telecom ADSL circuit is down - you're an idiot for not having a backup.

If you can't get your facebook/youtube/twitter - go outside, the weather is great.

mattwnz

19378 posts

Uber Geek

#731386 12-Dec-2012 13:47

Do telecom give free dial up access when broadband is down like several other ISPs?

NonprayingMantis

6434 posts

Uber Geek

#731388 12-Dec-2012 13:48

mattwnz: Do telecom give free dial up access when broadband is down like several other ISPs?

you get free dialup access with broadband always, so you could always fall back to that if you are desperate for a connection.

freitasm

BDFL - Memuneh
76342 posts

Uber Geek

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Geekzone

Lifetime subscriber

#731390 12-Dec-2012 13:52

Sure. If you can find a modem around you can use "free dialup".

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Talkiet

4689 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#731399 12-Dec-2012 14:03

NonprayingMantis:
mattwnz: Do telecom give free dial up access when broadband is down like several other ISPs?

you get free dialup access with broadband always, so you could always fall back to that if you are desperate for a connection.

Not correct... You get a Dialup account that costs some amount of money per hour to use...

Cheers - N

Please note all comments are the product of my own brain and don't necessarily represent the position or opinions of my employer, previous employers, colleagues, friends or pets.

wasabi2k

2092 posts

Uber Geek

#731410 12-Dec-2012 14:22

yeah - number of people with Telecom broadband who
1. own a dial-up modem
2. are able to get it connected and running on an available PC
3. know the dial-up numbers off the top of their head
4. would put up with the speed and

5. can actually be arsed?

about 3.

jonb

1739 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#731481 12-Dec-2012 16:40

wasabi2k: yeah - number of people with Telecom broadband who
1. own a dial-up modem
2. are able to get it connected and running on an available PC
3. know the dial-up numbers off the top of their head
4. would put up with the speed and

5. can actually be arsed?

about 3.

True. In our house:

1. Laptop has a 56k modem built-in
2. so could have connected it,
3. but no idea what the number or account details would be
4. could I have enabled connection sharing for other devices in the house?

5. "Internet's down, just wait and see when it come back again"

mattwnz

19378 posts

Uber Geek

#731490 12-Dec-2012 16:48

Talkiet:

Not correct... You get a Dialup account that costs some amount of money per hour to use...

Cheers - N

Yes I didn't think it was free. Perhaps that could be an idea for telecom. All the other ISPs I have been with, this is a free service with the broadband connection. It's ideal for people who need email.
I heard Radio NZ give the woman from telecom a bit of a grilling, asking why telecom didn't announce the problems on the radio when they occurred. Not sure myself whether the radio is the best platform, but an idea . The telecom status page should however have been updated when the problems occurred, which it wasn't last night.

JonoNZ

266 posts

Ultimate Geek

#731492 12-Dec-2012 16:50

Still down in Northcote Pt, North Shore. Yes, restart of everything tried, Chorus looking into it.

Yeeha, another night tethering.

kiwirock

660 posts

Ultimate Geek

#731516 12-Dec-2012 17:21

mattwnz:

Yes I didn't think it was free. Perhaps that could be an idea for telecom. All the other ISPs I have been with, this is a free service with the broadband connection. It's ideal for people who need email.
I heard Radio NZ give the woman from telecom a bit of a grilling, asking why telecom didn't announce the problems on the radio when they occurred. Not sure myself whether the radio is the best platform, but an idea . The telecom status page should however have been updated when the problems occurred, which it wasn't last night.

I think radio is a good medium for this, it's perceived as immediate when it comes to news. I'm bias as I used to work in commercial and community radio. But whenever I want to hear about something effecting people on a mass scale, I always rely on the radio, not TV. In saying that, it would hit the radio news checks within an hour if it was that wide spread anyway. And of course, a lot of people will start moaning on talk back reasonably quickly. I wonder if Campbell will be mentioning it soon.

Interesting point re: dialup. Did the authentication issues also cross over to dialup though?

Backup Internet is always handy. Hence why I don't have 3G with the same DSL provider.

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