UFB disconnects on Orcon

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tonysutorius

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#114309 15-Feb-2013 11:15

Gidday all,

i have UFB running in Porirua. We have Orcon's full speed business package with their Cisco router.

It has to be honest been a pretty lumpy experience so far, but I remain optimistic about the ability of this tech to extend the geographical reach of my business internationally in a pretty exciting way. When its working (!) it has already demonstrated this power.

The big issue for us now is that we are experiencing pretty frequent outages (weekly at least). These all seem to require a router power cycle to recover from. Given that our office is not always staffed, often I'm needing to access things from overseas, and all our phones are now coming through the same connection, its no joke... my business, including all our various servers, completely disappears off the face of the earth for sometimes hours at a time till we can get someone onsite to power cycle the router.

Orcon have been painful to deal with and don't seem to have any answers.

I could probably live with the outages themselves (without enthusiasm, given our monthly bill!) but the apparent inability of the router to reconnect by itself is a serious issue. We solved this one years ago on ADSL by going to a decent USR router which did keep trying... is there a similar UFB-capable router out there we can buy? Or can anyone suggest a way to get an effective rocket under dear old Orcon on this matter?

Thanks all, any thoughts really appreciated... we ought to be th eabsolute poster-child argument for this technology, but honestly I'm starting to wish we'd stuck with boring old ADSL!

Tony Sutorius
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antoniosk

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#762926 15-Feb-2013 11:28

What type of Cisco router has been connected?

________

Antoniosk

Zeon

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#762931 15-Feb-2013 11:35

Sounds like a crappy router. I would suggest using your own and give them the Cisco back. Look at a Mikrotik or PFsense would be my suggestions.

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quentinreade

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#762962 15-Feb-2013 12:24

Hi Tony,
Doesn't sound ideal at all - I'll get one of the guys to call and sort it out for you. Can you please PM me some account or contact details?
Cheers.

Comms chap

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tonysutorius

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#763056 15-Feb-2013 13:50

Thank you all for your responses!

Ours is Orcon's standard supplied small business router, SRP521W. As I understand it, Orcon do some fairly whizz-bang (and perhaps proprietary) remote provisioning for their UFB routers... does hooking up a third-party router "just work", or does it require some workarounds at their end? Anyone know whether or not they are up for it?

I have messaged Quentin as requested and am hopeful Orcon may be able to successfully figure things out now that he is on the case. I'll report back.

Thanks everyone.

Tony

quentinreade

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#763089 15-Feb-2013 14:21

Hi Tony,
Lance here is set to drop you a line (if he hasn't already).
Cheers again,

Comms chap

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RunningMan

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#763105 15-Feb-2013 14:36

I've found the Cisco SRP500 series very stable, particularly with the current firmware - uptime measured in months, and only power cycling due to power cuts or having to physically move it.

DrFixIt

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#763110 15-Feb-2013 14:42

Hi Tony --

I flicked through the settings for your SRP to your email.

Let me know how you get on.

Thanks,
Lance.

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tonysutorius

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#783854 19-Mar-2013 11:59

Gidday all,

Thought you might be interested in an update on this issue.

Lance from Orcon provided an updated configuration for our router, which seemed to help to a degree. Apparently during the initial rollout (we were only the second UFB connection in the Wellington region) an incorrect setup was applied in some cases, meaning the router was attempting to authenticate twice in a row, and would after fail as a result.

So, our rate of unrecovered disconnects from the world requiring a manual router power cycle dropped from about weekly, to a new rate of about monthly. A reasonable improvement to be sure.

However the problem still remains. Every few weeks the thing goes down, and doesn't come back up. Every time this happens we loose phones, email, web and all our other services. Given that our office isn't staffed 24/7, and that I'm often needing to access things remotely from overseas outside of business hours, this is a very serious pain in the behind for us, as you can imagine.

It happened again this morning, and for the second time the Orcon business helpdesk was unwilling to even log this behavior as a fault... apparently, since I had managed to restore service by physically replugging the router, everything is ticketty-boo. The practical issues outlined above cut no ice whatsoever, and led to a long and painful circular dialogue... essentially, its working, there is no fault, please go away.

It seems to me that, given that UFB physically replaced the old-school copper phone circuit that I believe had something like a 99.999% uptime rating, one would expect the UFB connection to be pretty good too, uptime-wise. After all it carries all telecommunications from the building now, including 111 calls etc. So it seems at the moment we're loosing it for maybe an hour a month on average that I'm noticing... a roughly 99.90 reliability, which is a bit irritating but I guess acceptable. Add in the extra hours downtime waiting for a manual reboot though, and you're in far worse shape.

Guys, I'd appreciate your feedback... is it reasonable for me to expect that a $200/month UFB connection should be smart enough to bounce back up by itself when a small outage occurs? Or am I being mystifyingly unreasonable, as the Orcon business helpdesk thinks?

Tony

RunningMan

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#783856 19-Mar-2013 12:08

Do you know what is actually dropping? Does the router log offer anything useful?

linw

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#783871 19-Mar-2013 12:46

Know what you mean, Tony. My UFB has been quite stable lately but it has gone out twice in the last 5 days. This morning it was only for a short while but that was just because I was online and noticed.

My phone was out for several hours unnoticed last Fri. (When it came back up after repowering I noticed, later, that the Genius had been reset as the password and SSID were back to the defaults).

It is spooky to think that, in time, the highly reliable copper phone system is going to be replaced for all users, requiring greater tech knowledge and forbearance. Can't imagine it being acceptable for a little old and infirm person living at home alone relying on the phone for medical alarms etc.

For businesses like yours it is really serious but it is a darned nuisance for any of us.

Not sure how this will eventually play out but methinks we are being a bit cavalier with these still too fragile systems.

maverick

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WorldxChange

#783874 19-Mar-2013 12:50

I would be expecting that you should have very good uptime with a UFB connection and the SRP521 as it is a very stable device when configured correctly.

We have been running these sine they first arrived on the scene and they do auto reconnect, Even Mauricio had one of the first units in the country as we were helping Cisco do the betas on these, he has been running one ever since (we did swap out one to the later hardware release),

I myself run one on UFB at home and the uptime is basically 100% over the last 6 months, I have 9 outages but all of these were me doing testing with different boxes, apart from that they are rock solid on a UFB connection, I run a pretty heavy home network as well with Apple TV's , Smart TV's Video Cameras , SIP Phones, remote working VPN's etc so they get a good workout.

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tonysutorius

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#783885 19-Mar-2013 12:59

I'm inclined to agree Lin.

It seems to me that the potential problem with the whole UFB concept is that the current advantages to the average user are pretty marginal. If this comes coupled with what seem obviously rather serious DISadvantges (like, your phone will now regularly die and stays dead till you happen to notice and physically go reboot your router)... well, its going to seem like a foolish idea to switch for most people.

Orcon (or to be fair, maybe just Orcon's helpdesk staff) don't seem to understand the risk they're running treating this sort of problem as a non-issue. Its actually a serious reputational hazard that could sink the uptake of the whole project,

Based on my own experience so far I'd be very reluctant to recommend the switch to anyone who needs (or is simply used to having) boring old always-simply-works telecommunications.

Perhaps at this stage UFB is only really suited to be a hardcore geek's hobby plaything, rather than a real-world tool you can trust your business to?

Tony

DarthKermit

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#783897 19-Mar-2013 13:18

tonysutorius: I'm inclined to agree Lin.

It seems to me that the potential problem with the whole UFB concept is that the current advantages to the average user are pretty marginal. If this comes coupled with what seem obviously rather serious DISadvantges (like, your phone will now regularly die and stays dead till you happen to notice and physically go reboot your router)... well, its going to seem like a foolish idea to switch for most people.

Orcon (or to be fair, maybe just Orcon's helpdesk staff) don't seem to understand the risk they're running treating this sort of problem as a non-issue. Its actually a serious reputational hazard that could sink the uptake of the whole project,

Based on my own experience so far I'd be very reluctant to recommend the switch to anyone who needs (or is simply used to having) boring old always-simply-works telecommunications.

Perhaps at this stage UFB is only really suited to be a hardcore geek's hobby plaything, rather than a real-world tool you can trust your business to?

Tony

Would this be any different than if you were using naked DSL (and had your phones over VoIP), and had to manually reboot your router when it stopped working?

Sounds to me that the router is the issue, not the UFB itself.

Whatifthespacekeyhadneverbeeninvented?

tonysutorius

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#783902 19-Mar-2013 13:38

Hi Darth,

No, it'd be the same, and in fact that used to be our exact predicament about six years ago (though not "naked" ADSL, we were using VOIP).

At the time I spoke with the techs at our ISP (Orcon, though a different vibe thinking back now!) who recommended the USR9108 router, specifically because it had the processor horsepower to keep retying to connect by itself during outages. From that day until the day we switched to UFB its been a non-issue.

Tony

ptinson

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#784087 19-Mar-2013 20:43

If you PM me your account details i can look at your re-auths and connection issue.
This morning we had a network element fail over this caused some customers to lose connection and need to re auth.

The modem should be auto re-connecting as well.

Paul

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