It was just our nice friends in China flicking the big red Huawei off button!

MikeHales: This morning Vodafone experienced an outage which caused mobile and fixed broadband customers to lose connection to the internet for around 30 minutes. We can confirm all services have been since been restored and we have a dedicated team monitoring our networks to ensure our mobile and fixed broadband connections remain stable. We apologise to our customers who have been affected by this outage and will continue to monitor our networks closely over the weekend.

Ouch, it makes me wonder whether Vodafone cable broadband would be reliable enough to use to watch the forthcoming World Cup Rugby broadcasts?

I guess Vodafone offers fibre to customers, so if you are on the "old" cable network, would it pay to switch to fibre for a more reliable performance? I haven't seen any reports of fibre broadband going down for 30 minutes or so, but it seems that Vodafone broadband has had a few instances of this happening.

frednz:

 

Ouch, it makes me wonder whether Vodafone cable broadband would be reliable enough to use to watch the forthcoming World Cup Rugby broadcasts?

 

I guess Vodafone offers fibre to customers, so if you are on the "old" cable network, would it pay to switch to fibre for a more reliable performance? I haven't seen any reports of fibre broadband going down for 30 minutes or so, but it seems that Vodafone broadband has had a few instances of this happening.

Fibre went down too, like I said before.

Or more specifically, the fibre itself was still up (I still had link to the Chorus network) but DNS was down and every other packet died pretty much the instant it entered the Vodafone network, according to tracert.

Oddly it was still possible to get DNS to work after that by switching to public DNS.  But then DNS worked and nothing else did.

uecasm:

 

frednz:

 

Ouch, it makes me wonder whether Vodafone cable broadband would be reliable enough to use to watch the forthcoming World Cup Rugby broadcasts?

 

I guess Vodafone offers fibre to customers, so if you are on the "old" cable network, would it pay to switch to fibre for a more reliable performance? I haven't seen any reports of fibre broadband going down for 30 minutes or so, but it seems that Vodafone broadband has had a few instances of this happening.

 

Fibre went down too, like I said before.

 

Or more specifically, the fibre itself was still up (I still had link to the Chorus network) but DNS was down and every other packet died pretty much the instant it entered the Vodafone network, according to tracert.

 

Oddly it was still possible to get DNS to work after that by switching to public DNS.  But then DNS worked and nothing else did.

 

Thanks for that explanation, so if you are currently using Vodafone's cable network and you want to change to Chorus ultrafast fibre broadband, as far as reliability goes, do you think it would make any difference whether you were subscribed to Spark, Vodafone, or say Stuff Fibre?

frednz:

 

Ouch, it makes me wonder whether Vodafone cable broadband would be reliable enough to use to watch the forthcoming World Cup Rugby broadcasts?

 

All providers are pretty well briefed on expectations on their networks.

If vodafone haven't already invested in the akamai nodes needed, one would expect it to be at the top of their todo list...

frednz:

 

Thanks for that explanation, so if you are currently using Vodafone's cable network and you want to change to Chorus ultrafast fibre broadband, as far as reliability goes, do you think it would make any difference whether you were subscribed to Spark, Vodafone, or say Stuff Fibre?

 

I don't really know about the cable network.  But in general I'm pretty happy with fibre, I get great download speeds and decent upload speeds.  And problems like today are pretty rare, this was the first outage I've noticed in several months.  I have no idea how much the ISP influences it, but I would imagine that they're all pretty similar.

Apsattv:

 

It was just our nice friends in China flicking the big red Huawei off button!

 

In this instance they needn't have done anything, because according to the brief newsclip I heard on R.N.Z the issue was (and I qoute) caused by "two software programs restarting"... So extrapolating from here - in a major Vodafone N.O.C there is a scheduled patch being applied to a dedicated D.N.S server system which requires a cold system reboot, someone forgets to schedule it for 4am and to  advance notify important clients with S.L.As and the rest is history.

This must have been quite embarassing for operations technicians, moreso considering that several essential public services contracted out to Vodafone corporate around 5 years ago. One of those I'm thinking of involves calls to 111.  Hopefully those systems and services run entirely on their own isolated infrastructure. *crosses fingers*

frednz:

 

Thanks for that explanation, so if you are currently using Vodafone's cable network and you want to change to Chorus ultrafast fibre broadband, as far as reliability goes, do you think it would make any difference whether you were subscribed to Spark, Vodafone, or say Stuff Fibre?

 

It would make zero difference. All providers have outages at some point or another, and statistically speaking any of those providers are just as likely to have an outage as each other.

The reliability and performance of the cable network also seems pretty similar to UFB these days with very few complaints from people.

Stu1:

MikeHales: This morning Vodafone experienced an outage which caused mobile and fixed broadband customers to lose connection to the internet for around 30 minutes. We can confirm all services have been since been restored and we have a dedicated team monitoring our networks to ensure our mobile and fixed broadband connections remain stable. We apologise to our customers who have been affected by this outage and will continue to monitor our networks closely over the weekend.

It's a diaster really I couldn't care less about not having internet but phone is not acceptable, you have pushed customers on to VOIP but you can't provide decent service. I have issues for months with VOIP dropouts I couldn't even ring home from Aussie last week. I have a daughter who often has seizures need to call 111 both mobile and phone were down today what would if happened today?. Do I need to have a spark cell phone as well to feel safe?

to make 111 calls on a mobile, you just need 1 working cell site to talk to - does not matter if it your provider or not, all networks will take the call - that why sometime your phone will say emergency call only at the top, it talking to another provider cell site, and no site for your provider around

bagheera:

Stu1:

MikeHales: This morning Vodafone experienced an outage which caused mobile and fixed broadband customers to lose connection to the internet for around 30 minutes. We can confirm all services have been since been restored and we have a dedicated team monitoring our networks to ensure our mobile and fixed broadband connections remain stable. We apologise to our customers who have been affected by this outage and will continue to monitor our networks closely over the weekend.

It's a diaster really I couldn't care less about not having internet but phone is not acceptable, you have pushed customers on to VOIP but you can't provide decent service. I have issues for months with VOIP dropouts I couldn't even ring home from Aussie last week. I have a daughter who often has seizures need to call 111 both mobile and phone were down today what would if happened today?. Do I need to have a spark cell phone as well to feel safe?

 

to make 111 calls on a mobile, you just need 1 working cell site to talk to - does not matter if it your provider or not, all networks will take the call - that why sometime your phone will say emergency call only at the top, it talking to another provider cell site, and no site for your provider around