No updates on Chorus fault

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › No updates on Chorus fault

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quickymart

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#1773715 1-May-2017 18:52

granada29:

Wow - I guess I trod on a few toes.

I read it as you wanted it fixed now and you feel the level of service is unacceptable. If you need that kind of uptime, you pay for that type of SLA...what you have (and I have too) is "best effort", because that's what we pay for.

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granada29

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#1773789 1-May-2017 19:58

Of course I would like it fixed "now". I also understand that is not the level of service I pay for.
That is not the issue. All I have asked for is a reasonable estimate of when the service is likely to be restored and that has not been forthcoming.

Jase2985

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#1773790 1-May-2017 19:59

who defines what is reasonable?

and i doubt anything has been updated as a result of this thread

hio77

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#1773817 1-May-2017 20:18

granada29: Thanks for that info.
Then why do Spark not make this info available. Not the details of staff numbers etc but at least the time estimates.
BTW the Spark help desk was repeatedly assuring me that the fault was being worked on when in fact it had been relegated to a lower priority and nothing was being done until today.

My apologies for missing this thread, i was caught up with my day job today.

Spark list outages on their site, http://www.spark.co.nz/outages/

Generally for a chorus outage, no ETR is set.. On the rare case one has been set, likely you will be able to ask for that time.

Most of the time, a chorus outage is handled with the utmost urgency although normally these faults are large outages that require alot of work to resolve the fault.

As far as agents are concerned, the out IS being worked on as that IS what chorus advise in the first place. It is later updates when ETR's and further details come forward.

I'll be clear, i come from the Business BB side rather than residential and i am aware their processes aren't always the same.

Personally absolutely i agree faults could be handled better in terms of notifications but it is a fine line between customers that just want to know when it is resolved and when there is an update available.

Systems are designed to be linked correctly so that when the fault is marked as resolved, this cascades into all the cases relating to the outage.

I do believe things could be done better but there is progress on improving the situation. Restore kit among other things has recently had quite a touchup to be alot more on hands and clear for a customer.

Thing you do need to remember though is often an update from chorus is an update that has been manually passed through another system with their contractors. You very much get stuck in a path of what update from chorus is valid to forward on?

Ontop of that chorus agents have their own speak, There will often be updates that have almost every single word shortened to a technical acronym.. only so much an automated system can do to translate that.

no change happens overnight however remember!

If you would like, I'm happy to look over your case and see that correct processes were followed and ofcourse relay the feedback to the right parties, Just DM me your account number/line number.

edit:

TimA:

Nah network events page. Was updated once every time the moon was blue.
I was on the email chain for faults that got identified then resolved. Couldn't follow a single one. Were so many coming through and some we didnt even get a resolved notification form. Would get a large outage and give it about 30 minutes before it was "Identified"
Try 100 calls in 30M that were BAU as Chorus hasnt given the word yet. Then all were "There is an outage, Try reboot your modem in a bit"

"My wifi doesn't...."
"Theres an outage reboot it"
"Ah my god its fixed :D" Every time..

Just to pick out on this point, Absolutely outages can be chaotic as ever on the floor.

I do believe that spark have the potential to identify faults within 15 mins at worse at it's core. But when you have a flurry of "Possible outages" it can be hard to split up the reports from the actual real outages.

Without saying too much here, I am very aware of some changes towards outage identification timeframes on the internal side for BAU processes.

Now a physical chorus outage, this can be pretty easily noticed, the DSLAM stops responding to testing tools and blasts big red i'm failing signs in an agents face.. (big Red patches does not always happen.)

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Lias

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#1774033 2-May-2017 09:24

Probably pie in the sky,but why doesn't Chorus just expose it's job tracking system as an API to the ISPs, so that they can feed job updates to the end user like courier tracking.

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hio77

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#1774034 2-May-2017 09:25

Lias:
Probably pie in the sky,but why doesn't Chorus just expose it's job tracking system as an API to the ISPs, so that they can feed job updates to the end user like courier tracking.

Solid point, i wish this was the case.
To some respects pstn is closer to this than bb which is backwards...

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DarkShadow

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#1774037 2-May-2017 09:33

Lias:

Probably pie in the sky,but why doesn't Chorus just expose it's job tracking system as an API to the ISPs, so that they can feed job updates to the end user like courier tracking.

Chorus has been talking about that for a while now. Haven't seen anything released yet.

atomeara

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#1775093 3-May-2017 18:00

I think most of this has been answered, pretty well but to be clear there is no formal SLA on ADSL or VDSL.

UFB has a default 48 hour SLA with some options to upgrade this. Business UFB (BS3, 3a and 3b) and BS4 with Chorus and UFF have 6 or 8 hour SLA, as does Chorus HSNS. I won't get started on Enable.

There are various reasons why work gets delayed including technician availability, health and safety (this is often a reason why things get delayed), property access, things like traffic management are also required.

Often with a fault they will send out a tech, then if it is a fibre issue a fibre tech, he will do an ODFM to find out where the issue is, then they have to set about fixing the issue. There have been a couple of major fibre strikes in the last week, taking out a couple of thousands customers each.

There is one fault in a rural area that took 3ish weeks to fix as they needed to get into a forest block which had a whole lot of health in safety as there was active logging going on with a rigging team to fix up a wireless link, in a pretty remote area.

Greenhithe got hit yesterday with a 144 pair fibre cable getting pretty damaged.

There is the Chorus outages page which has already been linked. I get emailed all the outage notifications which include more detail, you can also see them here http://status.as45177.net/

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#1775123 3-May-2017 19:34

The Greenhithe outage is impacting my parents xDSL connection

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