Why are all of these XT outages happening south of Taupo?

Forums › Spark New Zealand › Why are all of these XT outages happening south of Taupo?

nix

137 posts

Master Geek
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Topic # 57734 23-Feb-2010 09:17

Just out of interest, why are all of these outages confined to south of Taupo. Has Telecom centralised all of its capacity in Auckland?

Forgive me if this is a duplicate question (and point me to the answer please!). I'm genuinely interested in the answer.

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536 posts

Ultimate Geek

Reply # 301378 23-Feb-2010 09:40

It's continued problems with the Christchurch Radio Network Controller (RNC) which controls all cell sites in Taupo and below.

Bung

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Reply # 301380 23-Feb-2010 09:48

maknz: It's continued problems with the Christchurch Radio Network Controller (RNC) which controls all cell sites in Taupo and below.

That's obvious. Why should the Christchurch RNC be more fragile than the Auckland one? Is it geographical area rather than number of user?

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timmyh

128 posts

Master Geek

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Reply # 301387 23-Feb-2010 09:55

Yes this is a great question. Why should the least populous and hence least stressed part of the network keep failing? What is fundamentally different about the southern network from the northern? Differences in equipment and architecture design.

xcon

85 posts

Master Geek
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Reply # 301389 23-Feb-2010 10:03

i just got switch to XT yesterday from CDMA - silly choice i know - but its a work XT sim
i also notice the XT outages dont seem to affect Auckland as much (hope i didnt speak too soon)
im in auckland (fun times ahead)

oldmaknz

536 posts

Ultimate Geek

Reply # 301391 23-Feb-2010 10:05

My money is on bad install or gear from Alcatel-Lucent.

ariosto

46 posts

Geek

Reply # 301395 23-Feb-2010 10:15

I don't know. If it were that simple, surely there'd have been a move to replace whatever equipment was faulty or mis-installed by now.

It actually sounds to me like a design issue-there's probably a bottleneck or bug somewhere that stresses the network way over what it's expected to carry for that part of the country. That'd explain why it's taking so long to resolve anyway.

Maybe I'm giving Telecom and Alcatel-Lucent too much credit though.

mushion22

297 posts

Ultimate Geek

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Reply # 301398 23-Feb-2010 10:19

timmyh: Yes this is a great question. Why should the least populous and hence least stressed part of the network keep failing? What is fundamentally different about the southern network from the northern? Differences in equipment and architecture design.

Approx half of NZ's population live north of Taupo and half south, thus that is the point at which the RNCs' responsibility is split.

There could be a whole range of things that would mean Auckland is fine but not Christchurch. Could be slightly different network equipment either in the data centres or in the core network, could be environmentals (data centre conditions, power conditions), could just happen to be that some peice of equipment in Chch had manufacturing defects, could even come down to different engineers working on different sites that had used slightly different configs.

Can't really tell unless Telecom decide to be more open about the technical reasons, which is probably not likely (and I'm not suggesting that they should!).

nix

137 posts

Master Geek
+1 received by user: 1

Reply # 301402 23-Feb-2010 10:22

timmyh responded with "Why should the least populous and hence least stressed part of the network keep failing? What is fundamentally different about the southern network from the northern? Differences in equipment and architecture design."

I guess that's my question in a nutshell. Surely the Hamilton - Auckland sector of the network is the most populous and that should be where the greatest load is. Has TNZ put extra capacity in the upper North Island at cost to the rest of the country?

I don't think TNZ's Auckland customers are gloating - far from it. With dropped calls and weird hiccups being reported, most of us live in fear that it will happen to us too.

neop26

11 posts

Geek

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Reply # 301408 23-Feb-2010 10:33

our firm has to make a decision in the next couple of days abt which provider we will eventually go with. Our mobile connections are all still with Telecom and Datacards are all on XT. Vodafone has come forward offering iphones whereas telecom has offered HTC's which is what I prefer compared to iphones as business phones...

if the situation continues likes this I am not going to be quite fond of seeing normal non techy users carrying iphones around!!

I am sure there must be a lot of companies going through a lot of issues. Hopefully we will see some light at the end of the tunnel.

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ScottStevensNZ

245 posts

Master Geek

Reply # 301440 23-Feb-2010 11:48

Funny how all the technical 'experts' have come out on Talkback this morning...

Load & Performance Tester/PHP/JSP/C/PERL/MYSQL/LoadRunner8->11/HTML/CSS/XML/XSLT/2B|!2B/Cervelo Soloist/EMC Equip4/ Samsung Galaxy S /Darkys 10.2 Extreme

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use strict;
my $sheepCount;

Yes, they can.

sbiddle

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Reply # 301443 23-Feb-2010 11:53

neop26: our firm has to make a decision in the next couple of days abt which provider we will eventually go with. Our mobile connections are all still with Telecom and Datacards are all on XT. Vodafone has come forward offering iphones whereas telecom has offered HTC's which is what I prefer compared to iphones as business phones...

if the situation continues likes this I am not going to be quite fond of seeing normal non techy users carrying iphones around!!

My my experience it's the non techy users who enjoy iPhones far more than techy people who can point out all the limitations! The number of non techy women I know who have iphones and would never be interested in having any other handset is quite amazing.

murray29

24 posts

Geek

Reply # 301456 23-Feb-2010 12:45

as with everything, probably built by the cheapest bidder

BartManGeek

187 posts

Master Geek

Reply # 301467 23-Feb-2010 13:20

Love him or not Ian Wishart makes some good points:
http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2010/02/telecoms-woes-self-inflicted.html

PhoenixNZ

52 posts

Master Geek

Reply # 301651 23-Feb-2010 20:49

To the original question:

Why is it you can buy two identical problems and one is faulty while the other is fine? The ChCh RNC is not working the way it should and the Auckland one is. Its not a matter of not enough capasity or anything like that. Its simply faulty equipment in one place and not in another.

Doctor

39 posts

Geek

Reply # 301655 23-Feb-2010 21:06

Possibly setup or faulty hardware. Heck for all we know it could be a case of walking wounded hardware
From what I read of RNCs they're a complex beast that bridges the towers with the core network. Perfect place for Murphys Law to apply really

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