jmosen: Obviously, conducting planned maintenance at 1 AM is going to bother far fewer people than doing it at 1 PM. But it’s still discourteous and disruptive to run planned maintenance and not have notice of it passed onto the consumer, probably by Chorus informing the RSPs and the RSPs using all possible communications channels to let customers know.

I ended up doing the usual troubleshooting steps because I wasn’t expecting an outage.

Vocus also lost me as a customer today. There’ve been a few issues with them of late including some international speed issues earlier in the week. So in the absence of information to the contrary, I assumed they were experiencing more problems. Had I known it was a general Chorus thing, I wouldn’t have made the jump. Speculation fills a vacuum and it never ceases to amaze me how communications companies are some of the worst at actually communicating.
Knowingly taking the connection down and not saying somehting in advance isn’t acceptable.

If you've ever had to contact customers proactively regarding something like this, you'd understand that it's simply not feasible.

At my previous job with a small WISP, I worked for a company with less than 1000 customers at the time. Getting information to customers was simply painful, with out of date contact information, rejecting phone calls, wild accusations and all sorts of insanity to notify of outages, overdue bills, etc.

Unfortunately the only practical way to get a customer to take notice is to impact their service, and injecting banners to advise of overdues (which I belive Vodafone used to do in the bad old days) isn't even an effective method, because people don't read things unless they want to.

Providers have helpdesks, if you're experiencing issues, contact them and ask if there are any known outages. Also, as an aside, your troubleshooting should've taken you to look at the ONT and seen that it was in an error state due to the lights lit up, as the maintenance in question was impacting POLTs, and each area was impacted for a brief window only. I am a self-admitted awful customer to deal with, and I find this kind of outage reasonable and easily identifiable for a technical person, and if you're not a technical person you're calling the support desk or going "Well I guess I'll go to bed and see if it works in the morning".

Valcor:

 

TBH I don't see how it is that impossible to send a notice that is auto generated on outage maps like the Spark one also lists scheduled maintenance. No different from support tickets or tracking ticket that can automatically be generated and posted on ISP Network Status pages. It's not asking Chrous to ring every single person in New Zealand and tell them, but there is technology already that that auto updates status messages.

 

The issue here is this was a simply question and not sure why some people were met with such hostility. 

 

 

 

Again, as I noted, you provide that sort of notice and you'll generate a large volume of customer contacts asking for compensation, clarification, or just general anxiousness asking to rebook the work to a night they're not home as it might affect them. Simply not viable at such a scale.