Chorus fibre outage - Wellington 02/10/18?

Forums › New Zealand Broadband › Chorus fibre outage - Wellington 02/10/18?

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#2099871 2-Oct-2018 10:36

Lias:

Buried somewhere deep in the bowels of the UFB Services Agreement, you'll find that Chorus basically reserve the right to do maintenance any time they feel like, but will try and keep it between "11pm and 6am". At a previous employer with an extremely large WAN, this was the bane of the network team, because apparently even for very large corporate customers you can't get Chorus to agree a fixed schedule (e.g. Only doing maintenance on the first Monday of the month, and telling the customer in advance).

Hi Lias, all service providers have access to Chorus networks events information which will keep them informed on upcoming, planned or unplanned work.

With scheduled maintenance, we always try and work with individuals to pick the best time for work to be carried out. When it comes to multiple users sharing network infrastructure, a fixed schedule that everyone can agree on would be any network engineers dream! It's hard to even get a group of four people to agree on where they'll be going for lunch or dinner. ^MIke

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#2099874 2-Oct-2018 10:48

Chorusnz:

With scheduled maintenance, we always try and work with individuals to pick the best time for work to be carried out.

This is not my experience.

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#2099875 2-Oct-2018 10:49

dfnt:

Wouldn't kill the RSPs to have a note about the planned maintenance on their websites though

That's only useful if you're looking at the website every day in anticipation of planned maintenance. If it's just a way to find out why your internet is down and you're checking after the fact, it's probably just as quick/easy to post a question on a site like GZ as was done in this case.

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#2099881 2-Oct-2018 11:11

gehenna:

dfnt:

Wouldn't kill the RSPs to have a note about the planned maintenance on their websites though

That's only useful if you're looking at the website every day in anticipation of planned maintenance. If it's just a way to find out why your internet is down and you're checking after the fact, it's probably just as quick/easy to post a question on a site like GZ as was done in this case.

From an RSP point of view, certainly recognize this painpoint.

There are a few smart things out there that can be done now, It's the foundation for all that to my knowledge, all RSP's are yet to make use of in production (i have no idea if they have built it or not if it's not used ofcourse)

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Chorusnz

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#2099908 2-Oct-2018 11:59

gehenna:

Chorusnz:

With scheduled maintenance, we always try and work with individuals to pick the best time for work to be carried out.

This is not my experience.

It really depends on where the works being done, what type of services we talking about? A dark fibre network or leased line capacity on existing network. the more operators using as services there harder it is to find a time that suits everyone. It would also depend on the type of services level agreement. ^Mike

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#2099928 2-Oct-2018 12:29

Hey hio77, Have you used the new network-events tool For Services Providers?

It's been out since May 2018 https://sp.chorus.co.nz/network-events

^Mike

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#2099958 2-Oct-2018 12:43

Late to the party on this but I just had a look at my router logs for last night and it shows 2 drops between 4:55am and 5:30am, working fine today however.

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#2099963 2-Oct-2018 12:58

Chorusnz:

Hey hio77, Have you used the new network-events tool For Services Providers?

It's been out since May 2018 https://sp.chorus.co.nz/network-events

^Mike

Hey Mike, absolutely. in terms of chorus, i was directly referring to the API that goes with that :)

It's a great option and i've had some great chats with folks on your side about it.

Ofcourse having that API and functionality is great, providers just need to bend it and implement it in smart ways for customers.

I'm personally of the belief that simply an outage page is the wrong way to use the granularity that's possible.

Fragmentation is my only concern with these, the other LFC's arent always as detailed or need to be queried in different ways etc

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BMarquis

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#2100062 2-Oct-2018 13:57

Chorusnz:

Lias:

Buried somewhere deep in the bowels of the UFB Services Agreement, you'll find that Chorus basically reserve the right to do maintenance any time they feel like, but will try and keep it between "11pm and 6am". At a previous employer with an extremely large WAN, this was the bane of the network team, because apparently even for very large corporate customers you can't get Chorus to agree a fixed schedule (e.g. Only doing maintenance on the first Monday of the month, and telling the customer in advance).

Hi Lias, all service providers have access to Chorus networks events information which will keep them informed on upcoming, planned or unplanned work.

With scheduled maintenance, we always try and work with individuals to pick the best time for work to be carried out. When it comes to multiple users sharing network infrastructure, a fixed schedule that everyone can agree on would be any network engineers dream! It's hard to even get a group of four people to agree on where they'll be going for lunch or dinner. ^MIke

@Lias thats not quite true. We only ever perform service impacting, planned outages of the network infrastructure (like these OLT upgrades) between 12pm and 6am.
We give RSPs 7 working days (often more, we really provide as much notice as we can) notification.
We really do care about our customers, and look for the lowest usage times to perform the upgrades to cause as little disruption as possible. We are also investing/investigating a lot in trying to get upgrades of some core infrastructure to be hitless, or just a few minutes of outage instead of 10+mins.

Its very hard to have a fixed schedule agreed with lots of different RSPs and customers, so we stick to standard 12am-6am with minimum notification periods, etc. It's the only way to ensure that everyone know what will happen when and what to expect.

If we are upgrading something like an OLT or all ONTs, it's impossible to affect some customers but not others - the OLT needs to reboot...

From a few of the other comments here - yes, points taken about some kind of website outage notification, I'll see what I can do. In our defence, we notify all RSPs not only with service event notification, but also many months in advance that upgrades are coming.

steve2222

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#2100133 2-Oct-2018 15:14

BMarquis:

From a few of the other comments here - yes, points taken about some kind of website outage notification, I'll see what I can do. In our defence, we notify all RSPs not only with service event notification, but also many months in advance that upgrades are coming.

So to the Chorus guys and Spark guys (my ISP) on the forum, why can it not work like the electricity line companies and electricity retailers: I am with Mercury for electricity, but the lines company is Vector.

When there is a planned outage Vector sends us an email directly (maybe I had to authorise Vector having my email via Mercury - can't recall), but why can that not be emulated in the Internet space with Chorus sending a retail customer an email for a planned outage (even if it is an 'opt in' service)?

hio77

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#2100142 2-Oct-2018 15:30

steve2222:

So to the Chorus guys and Spark guys (my ISP) on the forum, why can it not work like the electricity line companies and electricity retailers: I am with Mercury for electricity, but the lines company is Vector.

When there is a planned outage Vector sends us an email directly (maybe I had to authorise Vector having my email via Mercury - can't recall), but why can that not be emulated in the Internet space with Chorus sending a retail customer an email for a planned outage (even if it is an 'opt in' service)?

my understanding is chorus have occasionally done flyer drops for area based work in a few ocasions.

the OLT upgrades based on notifications are 10,000s+ customers a night though. Little more than just a few customers so it may not be viable?

outage notifications really do land on the RSP side as your our customer, we are chorus's customer.

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BMarquis

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#2100205 2-Oct-2018 16:47

steve2222:

So to the Chorus guys and Spark guys (my ISP) on the forum, why can it not work like the electricity line companies and electricity retailers: I am with Mercury for electricity, but the lines company is Vector.

When there is a planned outage Vector sends us an email directly (maybe I had to authorise Vector having my email via Mercury - can't recall), but why can that not be emulated in the Internet space with Chorus sending a retail customer an email for a planned outage (even if it is an 'opt in' service)?

That is right, there is no current authorisation/update/etc process for Chorus to have the details of end customers.

At the moment, we notify the RSPs and it is up to them to notify their customers. I'm not able to comment on if this can or will change in the future.

Lias

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#2100321 2-Oct-2018 19:54

BMarquis:

At the moment, we notify the RSPs and it is up to them to notify their customers. I'm not able to comment on if this can or will change in the future.

I can't imagine the bulk of home users would want such notifications, but the GeekZone crowd would, and I'm damned sure those of us who work in IT would want them on the business side :-)

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.

hio77

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#2100326 2-Oct-2018 20:09

Lias:

BMarquis:

At the moment, we notify the RSPs and it is up to them to notify their customers. I'm not able to comment on if this can or will change in the future.

I can't imagine the bulk of home users would want such notifications, but the GeekZone crowd would, and I'm damned sure those of us who work in IT would want them on the business side :-)

the bulk of users is the problem..

If it was just geekzone... oh it would be brilliant chaos!

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dfnt

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#2100369 2-Oct-2018 21:51

gehenna:

dfnt:

Wouldn't kill the RSPs to have a note about the planned maintenance on their websites though

That's only useful if you're looking at the website every day in anticipation of planned maintenance. If it's just a way to find out why your internet is down and you're checking after the fact, it's probably just as quick/easy to post a question on a site like GZ as was done in this case.

Yes I was talking about after the fact, I'm not really fussed about knowing when it goes down for planned work. It's just nice to know I don't have to bother doing anything on my end.

The first thing I did was tether to my phone and go to the 2degrees website, nothing on there.

Went to Chorus website, nothing on there

Then came on here to ask

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