Kapiti FibreX and Cable TV outage - nearly 24 hours now <rant>

Forums › One NZ (including Farmside) › Kapiti FibreX and Cable TV outage - nearly 24 hours now <rant>

Lias

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#217874 16-Jul-2017 15:53

Just wanted to rant, Vodafone have had an outage for some customers of cable and internet services in Kapiti since the power cut last night. Power was restored after a few hours but for some people services are still out nearly 24 hours after the power cut. According to the call centre (and the not updated all day network status) this is due to the power cut..

How bloody hard is it to get in a car and drive up with a bloody generator? Do your engineers not like getting out of bed on the weekend?

I'm a geek, a gamer, a dad, a Quic user, and an IT Professional. I have a full rack home lab, size 15 feet, an epic beard and Asperger's. I'm a bit of a Cypherpunk, who believes information wants to be free and the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. If you use my Quic signup you can also use the code R570394EKGIZ8 for free setup. Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.

Jase2985

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#1823304 16-Jul-2017 16:16

what guarantee of service do you have with vodafone? im guessing none.

the problem could be more extensive than just the loss of power

sbiddle

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#1823306 16-Jul-2017 16:19

The HFC network can't easily be generator powered - the biggest issue is all the amps which sit all over the network. These can't be powered by generator, unlike a cabinet which can be.

If there are still areas for example without power affecting the amps then there is very little VF can do until it's restored.

RunningMan

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#1823312 16-Jul-2017 16:34

Looks like there's still a bunch of outages over the area

https://outages.electra.co.nz/

EDIT: Power outages that is.

Linux

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#1823315 16-Jul-2017 16:41

Have you asked for the ' Always Connected ' data bundle ?

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Lias

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#1823331 16-Jul-2017 17:18

@Jase2985 No I have no guarantee of service, because Telco's do so love to not offer those unless you are willing to pay moonbeams. That aside I doubt any residential customer in NZ would consider a 24 hour outage of all internet and TV services satisfactory or acceptable.

@Sbiddle Is that HFC networks in general, or just the TelstraClear/Vodafone one? It seems like a terrible design to have a critical network device you can't power externally in cases like this.

@RunningMan The only one of those that's really urban is the Mazengarb road one, which is still a few km from the affected property, most of them are rural/semi rural out the back of the valley or up in the hills.

@Linux Not much use, I'm not at the property (I'm just ranting because I'm copping it in the neck from those who are, and 24 hours is a stupidly long outage for something I pay for)

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#1823342 16-Jul-2017 17:28

Always connected can be added onto up to 4 Vodafone connections

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Edit : 24 hours is not really that long if you look on stuff some houses have not had power for 3 or 4 days

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Jase2985

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#1823385 16-Jul-2017 19:35

i think you may have some slightly unrealistic expectations of the service you are paying for

yes most wouldnt be happy, but it is what it is, and having a "soapbox" moment isnt going to achieve much

Pumpedd

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#1823439 16-Jul-2017 20:08

It was a bad power cut....they attempted to restart the power 4 times. I expect that would have blown many appliances in the area including VF assets.

sbiddle

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#1823552 17-Jul-2017 06:30

Lias:

@Sbiddle Is that HFC networks in general, or just the TelstraClear/Vodafone one? It seems like a terrible design to have a critical network device you can't power externally in cases like this.

It's HFC networks in general. They rely on amplifiers across the network.

At the end of the day this was a significant power event. I don't consider 24 hours an excessive outage for a residential best effort residential service. At the end of the day both VF and Spark provide free mobile data during outages so there would be no total loss of connectivity in such an event providing you have a mobile phone with VF.

nickb800

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#1823573 17-Jul-2017 07:58

Pumpedd:

It was a bad power cut....they attempted to restart the power 4 times. I expect that would have blown many appliances in the area including VF assets.

I noticed a cafe in Paraparaumu Beach without EFTPOS on Sunday due to power outage on Saturday night. Sounds like the repeated on-off was pretty rough on electronics.

Just to make it explicit for those out of the area - the power outage was only ~1 hour - the extended Vodafone outage is presumably fried gear resulting from the power outage. Given that power is back on, a generator isn't going to help in this instance, whether the network relies on dispersed amplifiers or not.

antoniosk

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#1823577 17-Jul-2017 08:07

sbiddle:

Lias:

@Sbiddle Is that HFC networks in general, or just the TelstraClear/Vodafone one? It seems like a terrible design to have a critical network device you can't power externally in cases like this.

It's HFC networks in general. They rely on amplifiers across the network.

At the end of the day this was a significant power event. I don't consider 24 hours an excessive outage for a residential best effort residential service. At the end of the day both VF and Spark provide free mobile data during outages so there would be no total loss of connectivity in such an event providing you have a mobile phone with VF.

For comparison, what's the lay of the copper broadband (ie field isams) and fibre network look like these days? I've lost track of what fibre looks like, as I recall the lasers and prisms were in the exchanges and central powered, so all thats in the street are literally point to point connections?

Just for conversation really... When power goes out, it goes out, and residential IP networks generally are not on the list of priority services I recall seeing ;-)

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Antoniosk