Astounding planned outage.

Forums › 2degrees (including Slingshot, Orcon, Flip, Stuff Fibre, MyRepublic, 2talk and Vocus) › Astounding planned outage.

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#3473896 26-Mar-2026 10:16

Linux:

@gbwelly kids were injured at school before the mobile phone was invented and even before the car was invented life went on.....

I was rushed to North shore hospital when I was at primary school early 80's with anaphylaxis from eating a new multi grain bread and my Mum still managed to make it to North hospital and pick me up and take me home in time for dinner

People had landlines in that era. Now noone does because mobiles have replaced them.

Richard rich.ms

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#3473898 26-Mar-2026 10:17

richms:

timmmay:

Even posted on the website???!!! Wow! If they knew the site was going to be down for that long I'd expect people who live in the area or are regularly in the area get a letter in the post.

You are assuming that they have a name and address for the people that use their network.

Silly comment

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#3473958 26-Mar-2026 11:37

richms:

Linux:

@gbwelly kids were injured at school before the mobile phone was invented and even before the car was invented life went on.....

I was rushed to North shore hospital when I was at primary school early 80's with anaphylaxis from eating a new multi grain bread and my Mum still managed to make it to North hospital and pick me up and take me home in time for dinner

People had landlines in that era. Now noone does because mobiles have replaced them.

Saying no one does is not correct

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#3474085 26-Mar-2026 15:07

Linux:

@gbwelly kids were injured at school before the mobile phone was invented and even before the car was invented life went on.....

I was rushed to North shore hospital when I was at primary school early 80's with anaphylaxis from eating a new multi grain bread and my Mum still managed to make it to North hospital and pick me up and take me home in time for dinner

It also used to be legal to climb these masts without fall protection, use asbestos, and send children down chimneys. Same severity, no, but something acceptable 40 years ago does not mean it is acceptable now.

richms:

You are assuming that they have a name and address for the people that use their network.

Presumably letter drop / 'to the occupant'.

People aren't complaining about the fact that it's an upgrade. They're complaining that they didn't get good advance notice, and there were no attempts to provide backup service.

Could be CoWs. The answer to "how many do you think they have" is "clearly not enough". I'm sure regulatory hurdles can be managed, especially given the CoW is presumably nearby the permanent tower.

Could be doing a deal with other operators to let your customers use their tower during outages (assuming not a shared tower), similar to the old 2D-Vodafone deal.

Even just better notification.

pdh

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#3474127 26-Mar-2026 16:45

My perception of kiwi infrastructure has been shaped by 30+ years in Canada - then 40+ years here... as an engineer.

For some reason, the concept of user-downtime or reduction of full efficiency (think motorway work) is given almost no importance in NZ versus Canada, UK, US, etc.

We seem to be happy taking years instead of months, months instead of weeks, weeks instead of days - you get the idea.

And here I'll lump Telecommunications, Water & Electricity in with Railways & Roads.
Services where the loss of time by users or consumers doesn't appear on any balance sheet.

As a teenager in the '60's, I became aware that a lot of public works got scheduled overnight to minimise disruption (eg: to commuters) and thought it was a 'good thing for society'. As an engineer I learned to plan & cost downtime as a consideration in commercial work.

And before all you telecom jokers tell me that you can't possibly swap out a 10-ton tower in less than 72 hours... let me point you at what I consider the most staggering upgrade project of all time: the Great Gauge Change of May 1886.

4 months after the decision to proceed - and without computers or emails - more than 6 competing Railways coordinated:
- physically changing 23,000 km of track (moving one rail),
- modifying 800+ locomotives (axles & drives) &
- modifying 10,000+ goods wagons (axles)

begun & completed in 36 hours...

I've project-planned many a NZ meat-works weekend / holiday shut-down for machinery rip-out & upgrade - so on a tiny scale I have just enough experience to say that the GGC-1886 project-planning & management was beyond Olympic gold ;-)

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#3474456 27-Mar-2026 16:17

@gbwelly is new the Wainuiomata site back online?

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#3474457 27-Mar-2026 16:24

@pdh interesting you speak about meat-works rip out and upgrade when the latest one I was across took 4 weeks - Site did no processing (not really across it in project way or anything) but this was a major bit of work

pdh

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#3474539 28-Mar-2026 01:19

>latest one I was across took 4 weeks

Well 4 weeks is a long time for a company to be down - unless it's at an already-scheduled break (eg: Christmas).

Obviously it depends on the industry... Biscuit manufacturers run every day for constant production & consumption. Fruit pack-houses spend most of the year waiting for the crop - then burst into life. So if you want to work in an industry you need to study its cost of downtime.

A few years ago I arranged to meet an old friend in Lubbock Texas - I was nearby and had a few days up my sleeve. He was inventing a new cotton 'bale' and trialling it there. Unfortunately, it rained the week before we were due to meet up - so the cotton couldn't be picked - so the plant had nothing to practice on - so he didn't come half-way across the continent to run his tests. So I had a truly lovely few day's in Texas' Big Bend National Park as an unexpected alternative.

My point (if there was one) in my post above - was that I don't believe that infrastructural projects in NZ pay proper (or sometimes any at all) attention to the public cost of downtime or delay - extra hours of commuting, lost revenue by shopkeepers, time wasted using or finding alternatives to the service that is degraded. Individuals may scream (or quietly go broke) - but the level of public outcry is surprisingly small. If we expected & demanded work to be completed faster - it could be. It might cost a bit (or a lot) more - but doing it the slowest & 'cheapest' way does push up the societal cost.

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#3474541 28-Mar-2026 07:12

Value of Lost Load (in $/MWh) is reasonably regularly used in the electricity distribution industry to predict the cost of an outage, and whether it's economically feasible to prevent - this is used to justify e.g. the duplication of Central Park Wellington for improved fault resilience.

I haven't seen much of the same on the telco side of things even though both encourage important users to have a backup in the event of an outage.

pdh

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#3474664 28-Mar-2026 11:39

Thanks for the link to the concept of Value of Lost Load. It's a good example of somebody trying to address the 'problem' I'm moaning about.

It interests me that the fixed valuation of 20,000 $ per MWh (or 20 $ / kWh) is deemed simplistic (in this report) - not a good fit across the range of commercial uses of power - but the power industry chose to leave it in place. Presumably it's in the too hard basket.

I can see that a PaknSav with non-functional lighting & tills might well lose more than 20$ / kWh, and might be willing to spend 100,000 $ to ensure a backup power supply - as would hospitals, airports, etc. A corner take-away might not afford the luxury of private backup. It's not a simple calculation.

I have spent about 2,000 / kWh to prevent sudden power loss in our house - so that my wife can work from home in a very fragile (electrically speaking) Auckland suburb. Our little suburb of about 500 people has a single line of supply, with quite old components and a very reactive approach to trimming power-line tree-interference. We average about 2 outages per week.

So I've put in 5 kWh of battery & inverter as a 10-hour UPS - and she can feel sure she can fulfil her commitments without driving daily to the far side of Auckland.

We (the community) recently had a pole replaced - with a very-well notified outage from (IIRC) 8 AM to 8 PM. As I was sheltering several extra work-from-home refugee neighbours, my BESS (battery system) ran low by 3 PM and I had to kick every one off. I had expected to be able to run up my generator, to recharge the BESS, but the genny kept blowing its breaker (now fixed, thanks to my sparkie). However, we survived the day OK.

I did wonder how Vector (or their sub-contractor) arrived at 12 hours for the pole replacement, but obviously it could have been much worse... I suppose there's an international metric / standard, a bit like a factory-advised service time for a VW service.

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#3474668 28-Mar-2026 11:56

You're talking about less than 2% of your annual connectivity being unavailable. Even in the worst case scenario where you never leave the area and connect to another tower you're losing 14% rounded of your month's service availability to a required maintenance. I'm sure if you contact 2Degrees, they'll be happy to refund you 14% of your monthly bill.

If you want 99.999% service levels, you need to pay through the nose for it. Dual SIM on different carrier networks, path diversity, many ways to ensure continuity of service. Reality is no one wants to pay for that though. If your phone is THAT critcal, get a second SIM on an alternative network, setup call forwarding when you're not connected to the network and suddenly you've got that continuity of service and diversity. If you don't want to pay for it, it isn't that important.

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richms

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#3474669 28-Mar-2026 12:02

Dual sim across 2 networks is a basic thing to do, its not an extreme expense or unreasonable.

Richard rich.ms

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#3474762 28-Mar-2026 16:51

pdh:

We average about 2 outages per week.

2 power outages a week is wild and unfathomable for me - I think we've had maybe one total, last just a few minutes, in Christchurch over the past decade.

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#3474764 28-Mar-2026 16:56

@gbwelly Wainuiomata Central 2degrees site only had 2 bands on it 1800 20Mhz & 2100 15Mhz prior to this upgrade removing the Huawai and going to the Ericsson hardware

I bet it a massive improvement on speed & coverage after this work

Site would of been getting smashed / congested I am surprised it did not have 700 or 900Mhz on it or both prior to the latest upgrade

When gis.geek is updated I will post what technology is on the site after the latest upgrade

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#3474768 28-Mar-2026 17:12

Didn't realise this was Wainui. Looking on gisgeek, there are 2D towers either side of it (about 2km) with 700 & 900 on them, as well as 1800 and 2100.

Surprised anyone lost coverage (not just degraded) from this unless there was an actual hill in a way (to be fair, Wainui is full of hills). I would expect 2D's coverage with the central tower missing to still be better than Spark's.

Poor handling of load-shedding?

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