Chorus ONT occasionally freezing

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MarkM536

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#318757 18-Feb-2025 13:55

I thought I'd ask here before contacting my broadband provider, subsequently Chorus.

ONT 300. Four times now the ONT has frozen (I presume) and my router reports no received packets from the device. This lasts for ~10min.

PPPOE packets resume ~1min after my routers WAN port receives some activity.

Public IP is changed each time.

No idea about the lights status. It was installed in a cupboard and I cannot see them.

I'm wondering if this is an update being pushed or an issue brewing.

East Auckland, and date/times have been:

11/02/2025 00:13

11/02/2025 00:57

11/02/2025 03:29

17/02/2025 10:02

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#3344166 18-Feb-2025 14:02

First thing I'd do is log a ticket with your ISP so they can run some checks and get a tech booked if required

toejam316

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#3344220 18-Feb-2025 14:44

Who's your RSP and what's your router? Do you happen to have a DHCP client attached to your WAN interface?

Anything I say is the ramblings of an ill informed, opinionated so-and-so, and not representative of any of my past, present or future employers, and is also probably best disregarded.

saf

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#3344279 18-Feb-2025 15:51

MarkM536:

East Auckland, and date/times have been:

11/02/2025 00:13

11/02/2025 00:57

11/02/2025 03:29

These three timestamps match with maintenance times announced by Chorus and could have impacted your connection - I'd imagine your ISP would have sent some comms around this.

The 17/02/2025 10:02 timestamp is probably unrelated however.

But with that in mind, if you were impacted by the Chorus planned maintenance, that would mean one connection drop outside of the maintenance, which could be anything.

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snj

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#3344326 18-Feb-2025 18:23

saf:

These three timestamps match with maintenance times announced by Chorus and could have impacted your connection - I'd imagine your ISP would have sent some comms around this.

Unfortunately, I've seen no proactive notification about the Chorus maintenances, the first and second ones actually took out the nearby RBI tower as well, so it was even impossible to lookup any details whatsoever, the second one I know Voyager had it on their status site, but no proactive notification. The third maintenance didn't take out the RBI site, so I did the rounds of various ISP status sites, Spark's was down/"Under maintenance", One NZ had details, 2degrees & Voyager didn't have anything at the time.

It's been particularly frustrating because 11pm/midnight isn't exactly late for a lot of people, but at least with advance notice you can plan around it.

I notice Quic has an entry for Chorus Auckland tonight, Spark has the same times but Nationwide, One NZ has the same times but in Auckland only Mt Albert, Mt Eden, Mt Roskill, Ponsonby & Three Kings (plus a lot of other non-Auckland locations), 2degrees say "No fibre and dsl outages or planned maintenance at this time.". Voyager have Auckland outages for the 27th and March 3 for the "Mound Eden UFB Handover", but nothing for tonight.

Going to be interesting if I'm going to experience an outage tonight/in the morning or not.

quickymart

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#3344400 18-Feb-2025 21:25

The timings could line up with planned work but speak to your provider first to log a fault, just to make sure.

richms

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#3344401 18-Feb-2025 21:39

saf:

These three timestamps match with maintenance times announced by Chorus and could have impacted your connection - I'd imagine your ISP would have sent some comms around this.

The 17/02/2025 10:02 timestamp is probably unrelated however.

But with that in mind, if you were impacted by the Chorus planned maintenance, that would mean one connection drop outside of the maintenance, which could be anything.

Hahahaha no, they don't tell you crap about this happening. I had a whole morning of outage because of their maintenance cock-up a while back and heard nothing from the RSP. That time was just after I had started a whole lot of files SFTPing from the seedbox to back home and I woke up with a handful done and a whole lot of failure.

Other times several short outages at night while trying to watch youtube etc. Wish they would do it during the day when I am at work so internet outages give me time to think about something else.

Richard rich.ms

Behodar

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#3344405 18-Feb-2025 21:56

Hah, I'm reminded of the time circa 2010 when TelstraClear decided to do undocumented maintenance the same night as a Warcraft expansion launch. They backed it off pretty quickly when the support line got overloaded at 10 PM!

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quickymart

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#3344411 18-Feb-2025 22:23

richms:

Wish they would do it during the day when I am at work so internet outages give me time to think about something else.

Problem with that is then you get businesses or people working from home complaining that they're losing service during the day.

michaelmurfy

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#3344430 18-Feb-2025 23:34

snj:

I notice Quic has an entry for Chorus Auckland tonight, Spark has the same times but Nationwide, One NZ has the same times but in Auckland only Mt Albert, Mt Eden, Mt Roskill, Ponsonby & Three Kings (plus a lot of other non-Auckland locations), 2degrees say "No fibre and dsl outages or planned maintenance at this time.". Voyager have Auckland outages for the 27th and March 3 for the "Mound Eden UFB Handover", but nothing for tonight.

Going to be interesting if I'm going to experience an outage tonight/in the morning or not.

Quic also send out LFC notifications directly to their customers as soon as they find out if your circuit is affected by any planned activity:

So I knew based on that I would have a short outage that night. The outage in my case wasn't long (a couple of short 5min blips).

Based on what I've been seeing over the last week I'd say the above was caused by maintenance.

Michael Murphy | https://murfy.nz
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toejam316

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#3344457 19-Feb-2025 09:11

Without going on a drawn-out multi-paragraph essay, Chorus and the LFCs have pretty reasonable maintenance windows, I know for instance anything with significant impact for Chorus or Spark usually targets a 0100-0600 window, with some less impacting things having a broader 2300-0600 window. Maintenance has to be done at some point to keep the networks secure, growing and operational. It's unavoidable even for the big spending corporate customers.

If you want to know about upcoming maintenance, select an ISP that will notify you like Quic or check with your LFC/RSP for outages and planned maintenance.

Also worth noting, the majority of maintenance while considering "impacting" from the LFC/RSP side, is usually transparent to the customer thanks to diversity the RSPs and LFCs build into their networks.

I think we had a pretty huge thread on the subject a couple of years ago now, and nothing much has changed since then.

Anything I say is the ramblings of an ill informed, opinionated so-and-so, and not representative of any of my past, present or future employers, and is also probably best disregarded.

boosacnoodle

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#3344460 19-Feb-2025 09:24

michaelmurfy:Quic also send out LFC notifications directly to their customers as soon as they find out if your circuit is affected by any planned activity:

So I knew based on that I would have a short outage that night. The outage in my case wasn't long (a couple of short 5min blips).

Based on what I've been seeing over the last week I'd say the above was caused by maintenance.

While it is great that Quic do this, why doesn't Chorus just post this online too?

CamH

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#3344465 19-Feb-2025 10:07

boosacnoodle:

While it is great that Quic do this, why doesn't Chorus just post this online too?

I imagine it's both to do with the fact that Chorus doesn't want to interact with the customers on this level - that's the RSP's job, and also that if they did post outages, I bet you they'd be bombarded with calls and emails that should go direct to the RSP.

cisconz

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#3344473 19-Feb-2025 11:13

boosacnoodle:

While it is great that Quic do this, why doesn't Chorus just post this online too?

With the complexities of the network, it is hard to know (Without internal RSP knowledge) if given maintainance will affect your connection or not.

For example,

In an Exchange, there are multiple OLT's (What the ONT connects to) - if they are updating just 1 or 2, is your connection going to be affected?

Also, 1 of my ISP's has handovers at Ponsonby, the other at Mt Eden, and my connections connect to Blockhouse Bay - so if there is maintainance at any of those 3 sites (Or sites that link them together) there is the potential for outages.

Chorus notify the RSP with specific cirrcut ID's that will be affected, so they can appropriately notify their customers - just some RSP's decide to not pass this on to their customers.

Hmmmm

MarkM536

307 posts

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#3344551 19-Feb-2025 18:29

Thanks for all the replies.

Chorus outrage map has had my area highlighted for a few days but no long-term outage so far.

What perplexes me is that the ONT has no transmitted packets to my router during the time. As if the device is disconnected. Is that normal..?

quickymart

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#3344553 19-Feb-2025 18:46

I'd still log a fault with your provider (who is it, by the way?) even if an outage is visible. If your issue is unrelated and the outage is resolved, you'll still have no service and would have to log a fault anyway.

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