Fibre Outage Browns Bay

Forums › 2degrees (including Slingshot, Orcon, Flip, Stuff Fibre, MyRepublic, 2talk and Vocus) › Fibre Outage Browns Bay

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meow
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#1830542 26-Jul-2017 10:30

tripp:

Have never heard of anyone having died from the internet not being on, unlike power and medical equipment.

But I do agree with you that ISP's/network providers should warn about work being done and I don't mean on their website an hour before. I have had it a couple of times where i go and do a snot load of trouble shooting of my own home network only to find out after waiting on hold for 30 minutes that they do have an outage happening.

Providers often put notifications on their website but the impact is often so small they just do it without notification. I fully agree however - It is indeed something that could be improved with some providers but I assume many of the outages are caused by break and fix type jobs where they can't notify everyone. For me I can normally see an outage in the middle of the night one or two times a month but I am normally asleep at this time so "meh".

I think what the OP is saying is when your landline goes down once you've converted to Fibre. We're in a world now where most people have mobiles or somebody a few meters from them does (unless if you're out in the middle of rural nowhere where you won't have fibre anyway).

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darylblake

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#1830543 26-Jul-2017 10:31

ronw: Sigh. Is the fibre network a critical piece of infrastructure. I think that is why the taxpayers paid for it and then digested it to a private firm, but that's another matter. I think and you are welcome to disagree but it is the same as power, telephone, water etc. It should treat all its customers as important. I bet we would not have had this sort of problem if Crown Fibre Holdings had been allowed to own the Fibre Network and lease it to all companies. That way we would have some competition and service. You also omit that it should be possible to use routers that can restore the connection after an outage. Anyway vI will persevere with trying to get the companies to listen

First of all. Are you absolutely certain that it is a Layer 2 or 3 issue.. (not layer 8).
Is your ONT light out?

Yes planned work can cause outages. So can a truck driving into a piece of infrastructure.

If it is that important to you to have something with an even better SLA. Then look into other options, perhaps a 4G failover. Perhaps purchase a diverse circuit. This is what Business' do and they pay a lot for it. If you are not prepared to fork out the $ for it, then you will just have to deal with a very small # of outages like everyone else. Go grab yourself a bite to eat, or kick a ball around outside for a few hours.

The GPON network is up a LOT more and works a lot better than the copper network. I would just be grateful you can use UFB.

tripper1000

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#1831595 26-Jul-2017 13:17

ronw:

Nor do I think marketing such a system that cannot continue without human intervention pretty stupid. In fact I am sure it would be pretty easy to market a solution that can diagnose when it is down and restart the service. At the very least Routers could include a sim card that Chorus could use to communicate with the router(s) as needed.

With both points above, the solutions have already been invented and are used in the industry.

There are routers that do detect failures and reset them selves after a pre-set amount of time with no connection, however with Orcon you are compelled to use their gear and it is difficult to use your own/a profession router. It's been a few years since I've played with the White Genius, but there may be the option buried in there somewhere - ?

Also, the Black Genius did have the option to use a SIM card for fail over, however this feature was never used by Orcon.

tripper1000

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#1831598 26-Jul-2017 13:21

With regard to VoIP, the "government provided" ONT's in my area are pretty good. Since switching from ViOP provided by the router to ViOP provided by the ONT the analogue phone has been much more reliable. I can't recall having to reset the ONT to restore voice where as I had to do it every few weeks on the router.

It is possible the unsatisfactory symptoms you are experiencing are more to do with the type of hardware and style of service your ISP provides, and less to do with network that gets it to your house.

ronw

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#1831610 26-Jul-2017 13:45

Thanks for all the helpful advice especially grateful for those that don't get angry and/or talk rubbish.

I am pretty sure it is just the router as once I boot it it works fine. I am lucky that I can boot it from my bed as the wifi is still up so can log into router and force a restart. In fact I was thinking of getting one of the PC's to do a ping of a remote site and if it does not get a reply wait 15 minutes and do it again if still down the PC could then ssh into router and force a restart. When I get some time I will have a play and see what I can do. The reason I want a to have uptime reliable is that the router does not restart after an outage. If it did I could live with short outages. I have security systems that rely on the network being up. My camera cannot upload photos etc. My heat pumps also rely on it so if I am away from home and something goes wrong it becomes essential to me that I can restart router remotely.

By the way my ISP saw my tweet about it and apologized for outage saying it was their fault. It's good to get a reply and an idea what was wrong.

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djtOtago

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#1831634 26-Jul-2017 14:27

Is not auto reconnecting after an outage a know problem with Orcon routers, or is it just yours? Maybe talk to Orcon about it.

I know my Slingshot supplied router reconnects automatically after an outage, so maybe the problem is just with Orcon supplied routers or just yours.

In the 8 months I've had fibre, I have never had to reboot the router or ONT, and I've had at least 3 planned outages in that time that I know of.

ronw

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#1831668 26-Jul-2017 15:05

I have no ideas of its common to Orcon. It's a Netcom device but I will have a poke around in it to see if I can give s setting that could cause that

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linw

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#1831837 26-Jul-2017 20:27

I am an Orcon customer and have experienced very rare situations like ronw.

I also think it would be reasonable to have the router able to detect an outage and reboot itself. Orcon routers do not do this. Just a pity their software couldn't be updated to reboot then who would care/know of short outages in the wee smalls?

alliao

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#1832020 27-Jul-2017 09:04

I'm pretty sure the newer firmware of the netcomm device does something like power cycle itself if internet is down... Or get one of those plugs that pings internet and power cycle itself if no internet connection is available.

I have VPN setup at home for families overseas, when they travel through censored states and this wasn't reliable, so i ended up setting one up on the cloud but then it gets blocked as it's within commerical IP range. So now I reboot it manually... when I'm out of the country though, sometimes home network will just go down and I get neighbours to kick the router.. pretty silly.

Aredwood

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#1846097 13-Aug-2017 23:13

My understanding is that alot of these problems are partly caused by Orcon using DHCP instead of PPPoE. With PPPoE, if any part of the network between your router and your ISPs BRAS server stops working, both your router and the ISP know you are offline. When the link comes back up, after a 5 second or so delay, everything comes online again by itself. The ISP can also manually disconnect and reconnect the PPPoE link themselves. Useful if they have had an equipment failure, and they need to assign you a new IP as a result. Cycling the PPPoE will get your router to ask for a new IP. Rather that having to wait for you to restart your router, or do a DHCP renewal.

With DHCP, the router can only look at the ethernet link status on it's WAN port. Problem is, unless the power to the ONT fails, that ethernet link is going to stay up. So the router doesn't know that something upstream is disconnected. And then a reboot is needed to tell the router to ask for another WAN IP, once the upstream link is fixed.

Ask Orcon if they can provision a PPPoE connection to you. Otherwise you might have to change ISPs. Have a look at this thread for a list of what ISPs use PPPoE. I also recall another thread about whether there was a way to remotely force devices to do a DHCP renewal. I'm pretty sure the consensus was that there isn't a way to do so.

And my router is currently up to 1 year and 8 months since it was last rebooted. And surely there would have been at least 1 small fibre outage during that time.

Main problem with PPPoE is that you need a router with more processing power to handle high transfer speeds.

linw

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#1846136 14-Aug-2017 08:16

Thanks, @Aredwood for a very informative post.

Perhaps Orcon could/should reply and clarify. We would like to know if it is definitely not possible for them to reboot the router after a service outage. (Perhaps a timer that re-powers the router at 5 am every morning would be a crude answer)?

It would plug a hole if there could be some sort of restart solution. The Internet break is not the main concern in my household. It is the landline being down with no warning. My technophobic wife often relies on an incoming phone service for early morning sport cancellations and it would be nice if she didn't have to check the phone line every day in case it is out because of a planned service outage.

Thanks, Orcon, in anticipation of a reply!

PS We had another outage a few days ago.

PPS I don't need someone telling me I need a SLA.

PPS I am not angry, just asking if there is any hope with this, apart from changing ISP that I don't want to do.

Nebbie

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#1846445 14-Aug-2017 15:15

Quite an interesting thread to read.

Outages & Customer notifications are a lot more complex than the average person thinks it is, for example there could be 100's of planned works ranging from degraded services meaning not fully down but some degradation to full no service planned works.

A number of company's also do planned works for jobs that could have a possibility for outage but carry's a low risk. I believe this is the main reason why the residential users are not actively notified about planned works due to the sheer number of planned works would confuse the average person all this does is put more cost on the RSP and ultimately that will be passed onto the end users.
If you have a business account anything is possible redundant links however you will need to pay for it.

Comparing fibre/internet services to the power grid is like comparing peers with apples on top of this the power grid has been around for over 100 years now yet the internet has not. Power systems has time goes on gets more resilient to issues as problems are discovered and fixed the internet is going though the same thing however this is a world wide power grid and is millions of times more complex than just the New Zealand power grid.

One has to also take into account that geekzone users are not the "average" user we are well geeks more of a high end user so our personal expectations and internet experience requirement needs are different to that of my father for example.

If you want changes this would have to go though the government to regulate the process, but you will have all telcos opposing this, unless there is financial intensive.

I know whats its like when the internet goes away for me the the world is ending. :)

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deadlyllama

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#1846492 14-Aug-2017 16:27

Aredwood:

My understanding is that alot of these problems are partly caused by Orcon using DHCP instead of PPPoE. With PPPoE, if any part of the network between your router and your ISPs BRAS server stops working, both your router and the ISP know you are offline. When the link comes back up, after a 5 second or so delay, everything comes online again by itself. The ISP can also manually disconnect and reconnect the PPPoE link themselves. Useful if they have had an equipment failure, and they need to assign you a new IP as a result. Cycling the PPPoE will get your router to ask for a new IP. Rather that having to wait for you to restart your router, or do a DHCP renewal.

...

I used to have this problem with MyRepublic, often. They'd give out really long DHCP leases (days); something would die at night and my internet wouldn't come back until I forced the router to do a DHCP renew.

I don't recall it being an issue with the old black Genius (on the same UFB connection that MyRepublic had trouble with).

linw

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#1846497 14-Aug-2017 16:35

I have never expected to be notified of outages as I know that is not reasonable as outlined above.

I just would like the router to recognise the Internet is MIA and reboot itself but, as Aredwood says above, this may not be possible.

So, another option is to have a scheduled Internet check followed by a reboot if needed.

With the help of cleverer people than me, I have a vbs script that can reboot the router if the Internet ain't there.

But, question, is there any security risk if LAN access for Telnet is enabled on the router?

richms

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#1846605 14-Aug-2017 18:34

I have regularly seen cell signal disappear or go really weak for a while overnight for some time while they are doing things.

Used to have calls not go thru on the old style phone sometimes too, got the your call cannot be connected guy. Try again a little later, and it worked. With the grandparent phone, the only thing that a dialtone tells you is that the other end is still switched on and you have a connection back to it, whereas the IP network will lose dialtone when it isnt able to register. The old network would only tell you that when you tried to place a call.

Also bigpipe have been good about emailing about upcoming outages.

Richard rich.ms

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