Anyone else on Skinny having data disconnected at 5pm weekdays?

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › Anyone else on Skinny having data disconnected at 5pm weekdays?

snowfly

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#270041 20-Apr-2020 17:20

Is anyone else on Skinny having their mobile data session disconnected at 5pm weekdays?

Today, and last week (ever since Skinny introduced their free week day 1GB data between 9am-5pm), I have had my 4g mobile data sessions disconnected, and they take at least 10-15 minutes to come back up.

This is on 2 separate SIM's, both on $16 plan, one in a mobile, one in a wireless broadband modem.

Rather annoying when I'm working from home, logged into remote servers, doing work, or on conference calls via Teams, and data cuts out bang on 5pm. :(

I'm guessing the local Skinny tower/network boots people off at 5pm, so data sessions can start again?

Linux

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#2466486 20-Apr-2020 17:34

They must clear down the PDP context (Data session) so the charging is correct but connection should almost come back-up immediately

KiwiSurfer

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#2466517 20-Apr-2020 18:23

Ah so it's not just me and the timing makes sense too. On my phone it only started working again when I set it to airplane mode then back to normal mode. Hopefully Skinny has an answer for this? This didn't happen for the free weekend data (or perhaps I didn't notice) so possibly some issue with how the free weekday data has been set up?

Something else I noticed last time this happened (nottoday) the Skinny app seemed to work OK. But other traffic (e.g. Speedtest, NZ Herald, etc) didn't work. OP, did you notice this too? I wonder if it works fine for zero rated but not for chargeable data.

firefuze

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#2466569 20-Apr-2020 19:35

This has been happening to me too. Driving me nuts. Have to restart phone or toggle airplane mode. Glad it’s not just me - was about to restore my phone.

snowfly

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#2466599 20-Apr-2020 19:51

Glad I'm not the only one then!

During the 10-15 minutes after 5pm I could only get very slow and intermittent traffic to the Skinny App and website, but it was patchy at best.
Nothing outside Skinny worked.

Perhaps the same issue was happening over summer during free data weekends, but no one noticed at midnight on a Sunday.
But 5pm every weekend is a real pain!

I tried rebooting my phone, airplane mode on/off, turning data on/off, but nothing worked for 10-15 minutes. (did the same on the wireless skinny modem too, same 10-15 minute downtime)

Linux

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#2466611 20-Apr-2020 20:17

If they are dropping the PDP context of all active data connections instead of just clearing the data session this could cause some load as all the handsets trying to reconnect

Mandah

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#2466700 20-Apr-2020 22:25

Yes. Both my parents are on Skinny plans and since the beginning of the Skinny promotion our messages sent to them after 5pm only come through to their phones after 9am the next morning, and their messages out say 'sent' but aren't actually received until after 9am the following morning. It's so frustrating! I'm telling them to ring Skinny and find out what's up because they are paying for poor service but I guess a phone call seems like more of a hassle to them. Ugh.

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snowfly

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#2466869 21-Apr-2020 10:19

I reached out to Skinny yesterday about this, and they responded this morning as follows:

"Our support team is aware of this and we have escalated this to our operations team.

As all subscribers are having their bonus data expiring at the same time,
all their devices are sending data reservation extension requests at almost
the same time around 5:00PM. This causes a delay when trying to switch to your normal data.

We are looking at a workaround that will be implemented shortly."

snowfly

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#2467223 21-Apr-2020 17:08

Some progress, I didn't get disconnected today at 5pm :)

But looks like Skinny applied a temporary fix, according to the App and website, my bonus data was extended to 5:14pm, rather than 5pm.
Will wait and see what happens then...

KiwiSurfer

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#2467225 21-Apr-2020 17:11

snowfly:

Some progress, I didn't get disconnected today at 5pm :)

But looks like Skinny applied a temporary fix, according to the App and website, my bonus data was extended to 5:14pm, rather than 5pm.
Will wait and see what happens then...

Wonder if they're setting everyone's expiry time to 5:00pm + RANDOM() to spread the load.

Data working fine at 5:11 and seems to be coming out of my usual data bucket.

- James

snowfly

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#2467229 21-Apr-2020 17:17

KiwiSurfer:

Wonder if they're setting everyone's expiry time to 5:00pm + RANDOM() to spread the load.

Data working fine at 5:11 and seems to be coming out of my usual data bucket.

- James

That is my thoughts too, of my 2 Skinny SIM's, one had bonus data finish a few minutes after 5pm, the other at 5:14pm.

Makes sense then to spread the load of when everyone's device reconnects.

Good to see they were quick with a fix, thanks Skinny 👍