Chch fibre outage this morning

Forums › 2degrees (including Slingshot, Orcon, Flip, Stuff Fibre, MyRepublic, 2talk and Vocus) › Chch fibre outage this morning - ongoing.

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Jorjeis

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#1477899 24-Jan-2016 19:30

michaelmurfy:

New provider will have outages too. It happens, just move on and deal with it. I don't know of a single provider who doesn't have outages. If the issue is serious it can take some time to resolve.

Honestly, I would know - I used to work for a large ISP. Go outside, read a book, use mobile broadband (if you must). 10 hours is actually nothing. If you do require broadband 24/7 then take up a business plan with a service level but be warned as you'll be paying through the roof for it or even get an ADSL connection with another provider and failover to it if your main UFB connection goes down.

I also would know. I've worked with ISPs before and been a sysadmin for cloud providers for a number of years if we want to go down the argument from authority route. I understand that faults happen - what I want is an RCA, particularly as (if my hunch is correct) this was caused by scheduled maintenance. 10 hours is not nothing and expecting communication on the issue after the fact is not unreasonable.

My biggest gripe is honestly with the contact centre after the buyout by 2degrees. When it was Snap you could ring tech support and the person you were speaking to actually knew what was going on and could answer technical questions, and that is most definitely not the case any more.

tdgeek

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#1477901 24-Jan-2016 19:40

It was scheduled maintenance as per your hunch ?
If it was and it ran over time fair enough but really , hunches are just that. Speculation

Jorjeis

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#1477902 24-Jan-2016 19:43

Outage started after 3am Sunday morning. Regular change windows in my experience are normally 2am-3am Sunday morning for ISPs. It's just a guess in lieu of any information at all from 2degrees and I never said otherwise.

tehgerbil

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#1477920 24-Jan-2016 20:16

I would understand the bitching "stop complaining, change isp's if you're not happy" if it were just internet, but thanks to phone lines now flowing over fibre a 10 hour outage to phone lines, that's alarms, monitoring and communications down for fibre customers, that's a bloody issue, you can't take away someone's phone line for 10 hours without an explanation. Not cool.

Talkiet

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#1477924 24-Jan-2016 20:25

tehgerbil:

I would understand the bitching "stop complaining, change isp's if you're not happy" if it were just internet, but thanks to phone lines now flowing over fibre a 10 hour outage to phone lines, that's alarms, monitoring and communications down for fibre customers, that's a bloody issue, you can't take away someone's phone line for 10 hours without an explanation. Not cool.

[STRICTLY personal opinion here - this is NOT Spark opinion/policy/statement]

Yes it would suck being without all fixed comms (and alarm/surveillance etc) for an extended period - but that's what the country wants. They want cheap, inherently less reliable voice solutions than they used to have. The availability of the POTS network was (and still is) staggeringly good - easily better than any residential VOIP system available in NZ today... But there's been a steady drop of people paying for it and commercially the VOIP solutions are probably the only way forward.

Given they all use a residential BB connection for the access link, and given most people won't have a backup power solution, this is going to happen more often - losing "Internet" is going to mean losing all but mobile... And that's what people pay for.

So I agree that it's not cool to lose all comms for 10 hours, but I would also say that it's what "we" all are now prepared to pay for.

Cheers - N

ps. There are options available to have a mobile backup in case your fixed line link goes down. If constant comms are really important to people - they will buy that service, and they will have a UPS.

Please note all comments are from my own brain and don't necessarily represent the position or opinions of my employer, previous employers, colleagues, friends or pets.

michaelmurfy

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#1477926 24-Jan-2016 20:26

Jorjeis:

michaelmurfy:

New provider will have outages too. It happens, just move on and deal with it. I don't know of a single provider who doesn't have outages. If the issue is serious it can take some time to resolve.

Honestly, I would know - I used to work for a large ISP. Go outside, read a book, use mobile broadband (if you must). 10 hours is actually nothing. If you do require broadband 24/7 then take up a business plan with a service level but be warned as you'll be paying through the roof for it or even get an ADSL connection with another provider and failover to it if your main UFB connection goes down.

I also would know. I've worked with ISPs before and been a sysadmin for cloud providers for a number of years if we want to go down the argument from authority route. I understand that faults happen - what I want is an RCA, particularly as (if my hunch is correct) this was caused by scheduled maintenance. 10 hours is not nothing and expecting communication on the issue after the fact is not unreasonable.

My biggest gripe is honestly with the contact centre after the buyout by 2degrees. When it was Snap you could ring tech support and the person you were speaking to actually knew what was going on and could answer technical questions, and that is most definitely not the case any more.

The issue is now resolved. They don't have to go through the technical aspect of the outage, if you wanted that then join a specialised niche ISP like Solarix and pay through the roof for data.

tehgerbil:

I would understand the bitching "stop complaining, change isp's if you're not happy" if it were just internet, but thanks to phone lines now flowing over fibre a 10 hour outage to phone lines, that's alarms, monitoring and communications down for fibre customers, that's a bloody issue, you can't take away someone's phone line for 10 hours without an explanation. Not cool.

Again - those customers that vitally need phone lines for health reasons will be using Copper still since VoIP simply can't replace these. Also most alarm monitoring these days is done via mobile + IP for customers who vitally need it. Their VoIP offering again, is best effort.

Michael Murphy | https://murfy.nz
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ajw

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#1477948 24-Jan-2016 22:07

There is such a thing as a mobile phone to still keep in touch during a outage. Unless you don't have coverage.

nunz

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#1477973 24-Jan-2016 23:20

Heres a case.
a motel in riccarton.
their adsl was stuffed owing to congestion.
went to fibre so ckients and voip work for them

fibre down affects bookings, eftpos, guests etc.
3g fail over won't cut it.and again crap speeds near mandeville street and big no connection holes.

adsl was crap so they ditched copper line based networks.

Thry kept one line for pos and fail over phones to mobile but there is no real alternatives for them

ive had clients bent over by telecom for their commercial guarenteed lines but they too failed at times and who wants to pay that much for 2mb connections.

yes you get what you pay for...well actually you dnt. The shafting of consumers by tcom and other isps...high data charges...bad service..massive profits means consumers feel no loyalty or obligation to pay. They got shafted when prices were high....why not cut costs ....

If isps offer services at prices that are unsustainably low then tough to them. People will pay for quality but where do you find that nowdays.

jnimmo

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#1478016 25-Jan-2016 08:04

Otagolad: Wouldn't have happened at Snap 😠😜

Actually authentication failures have been pretty common for Snap/2degrees, remember at least one decent one each year for a long time now.

I'm sure it isn't just authentication but that is the symptom.

mad01

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#1478050 25-Jan-2016 09:28

l43a2:

DTan: About 10 hours of downtime. Not happy at all. An apology and explanation from 2D please.

LOL 10 hours of downtime is within normal operational SLA for residential customers (note you dont have an SLA) so it works on best effort.

Wow I can't believe some of the comments on this thread.

I get that things go wrong. But 10 hours downtime is NOT normal. Who can remember having their fixed line go down for more than an hour? (Christchurch earthquake excluded)?

And the 'you get what you pay for' doesn't work either. Facebook is cheap. Gmail is cheap.

$100/month isn't cheap. And if it breaks then they give me someone else then 'try again in 30 minutes'.

Anyway... Keeping this in perspective - there are a lot of worse things in life than this outage...

Lastman

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#1478074 25-Jan-2016 10:23

With the reliance people now have on the Internet fault tolerance will become a lot lower.

Especially frustrating if you can't even get through to a call centre to report the fault.

Is good fault self-diagnosis in place eg will a cabinet raise a fault if its equipment is not fully operational-interested to know.

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2degreesCare

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#1478386 25-Jan-2016 16:24

Hey everyone,

We apologise for the outage that affected some of our customers in Christchurch yesterday. This was caused by an unplanned network failure, not scheduled maintenance, between our network and our wholesaler’s network. Once discovered our teams worked extensively to troubleshoot the issue with the wholesaler to identify, isolate and remedy the cause.

We also apologise for any frustration caused with any lack of communication on our website or on social media, please be assured we are making some changes to improve things going forward. Please visit our Broadband Network Status page in future for any issues on our broadband network - https://www.2degreesmobile.co.nz/help-and-support/personal/mobile/service-status/#tab2

If anyone has any further concerns regarding this outage, please feel free to send me a PM.

Thanks

Ralph ^JOB

Jorjeis

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#1478407 25-Jan-2016 16:29

Thanks Ralph. A couple of questions; is there any automated monitoring on the link? It seems it took a very long time to detect there was an issue. Secondly is there any redundancy in the systems affected, or any plans to implement redundancy?

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