4g broadband fault at Lower Kaimai PCI 343

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › 4g broadband fault at Lower Kaimai PCI 343

CIT6D65

6 posts

Wannabe Geek
+1 received by user: 3

#306242 6-Jul-2023 17:35

Are any other spark customers in the area experiencing connection problems?

We see connection issues when band 3 or 7 is selected as the primary component carrier and carrier aggregation is triggered.

If you are in the area, you can test the above by logging in to your smart modem web page, clicking on the 'Network Status' tab looking at the section under 'Mobile Radio Info' and checking the value for PCC. If it is band 3 or 7 and an ookla speed test is performed, we see the link destroyed when carrier aggregation attempts to add a SCC.

Interestingly, when band 3 or 7 is used as SCC and the primary is band 1 or 28, this seems to work fine.

We are having trouble communicating with customer support.

They seem fixated on a previous power issue at the site, which was remediated during scheduled maintenance months ago.

If you are experiencing similar issues, please feel free to let me know.

I will do everything i can to help escalate.

Cheers.

CIT6D65

6 posts

Wannabe Geek
+1 received by user: 3

#3180536 11-Jan-2024 12:42

The issue has been fixed.

Spark advised that "some equipment had fallen off the cell tower".

freitasm

BDFL - Memuneh
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#3180594 11-Jan-2024 14:37

Did it take six months for it to be fixed? Looking at the time stamps on both your posts.

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CIT6D65

6 posts

Wannabe Geek
+1 received by user: 3

#3181434 13-Jan-2024 12:07

It took just over a month to fix after multiple calls providing all the info i could from the client side. I confirmed the outage was affecting multiple neighbors with the same symptoms. One neighbor was forced to replace their modem. I asked to merge the tickets and use the same ticket number for all affected customers, they were unwilling/unable to do so. I asked them to publish the outage on the outage web page, they were unwilling/unable to do so. When i called and referred to previous calls and ticket numbers they were unable to find the info in their systems.

Sorry, i should have stated they only took a month to fix it. They did also finally credit a month on our invoice.

The way this fault was handled is up there with the worst infrastructure management and customer service ive experienced in a couple of decades.

The only thing that came close was trying to troubleshoot a multi site tunnel between 2 businesses over 4 different provider networks. Providers refused to assist, accept responsibility or provide sanitised configs. It took me a whole day to prove the root cause. I had to make a friend at the city's port so i could get on site to capture some traffic. It took a month to convince the provider to change a line of nat config in one of their routers, which immediately resolved the fault.

If provider equipment/configs/systems are logging faults, or nodes have simply gone dark because "something has fallen off the tower", this data should be immediately available to customer service so that customers can be notified, resolution priority checked with engineering and communicated to the customer. We can provide this level of service ourselves using cheap hardware and free software. I believe that level of service is achievable and scalable for a company with this level of resources.

Great service can be affordable and capable staff are worth keeping.

I have a technical question related to this, i will ask elsewhere as i've made this post too long.

Sorry again, this time for the wall of text.