"best endeavours"

My IDNet service went down for an hour recently. This isn't unacceptable in and of itself -- it's a broadband service, not a leased line. However, when I contacted IDNet to ask why the service went down, their explanation was somewhat disappointing:

Apologies, there is no way of us finding out why your service dropped at this time, as mentioned in my previous email.

"I cant see any notification to say there was any planned work affecting your service, however this could have been unplanned maintenance or emergency repair work."

The reason for this is because we do not receive any notification of emergency repair work or unplanned maintenance.

Please note, this is a best endeavours product with no guarantee of uptime, it will occasionally have blips and times in which it is unusable.

At a minimum I would've hoped that IDNet checked their PPP logs for unusual activity, and possibly also raised a query with the backhaul provider. But perhaps my expectations for a ~£36 broadband product are too high?

Definitely too high.

They can't tell a difference between you turning your router off and the PPP session being broke due to a local fault.

It's asking too much to expect your provider to reach out to the access network provider (Openreach) and their backhaul provider (BT Wholesale/Talktalk Business) every time your session drops to ask of there's a fault/emergency maintenance going on.

Interesting because I have had an outage in the last year and was a bit frustrated that they couldn't advise me why.

It looked to be a wider outage as it was reported on our local NextDoor group and even the likes of TT and Sky seemed to be able to advise their customers of the reason.

Would there be a reason for the mass market ISPs to have access to this information but for IDNet not to be able to?

jaydub

Simply cost due to scale.

If you have a 100 customers in an area all go down at te same time you can build an automated system to alert you, then find the reason from OR / BTW / ANother an notify that list of customers.

If you have one customer you have no idea whether they just turned the router off or if it was a major fault so no way to run the system. You cannot afford to check every time a customer turns something off so don't even build the manual system to check.

It's asking too much to expect your provider to reach out to the access network provider (Openreach) and their backhaul provider (BT Wholesale/Talktalk Business) every time your session drops

Agreed, but it appears that they're current position is "the connection up now, so there's no need to do anything". This isn't what I expect from a "Military Grade Network" which claims to be "the most reliable" -- I'd expect them to have a culture of continuous improvement and to always strive for the minimum amount of downtime.

If you have one customer you have no idea whether they just turned the router off or if it was a major fault

This is fair. I'd like to think IDNet would check their PPP logs to see if other customers on my backhaul / exchange combo also lost their connections at around the same time, and I've asked them to reassure me of this. If this was a one-off "blip" and it appears that I'm the only customer that was affected then I'm happy to continue to monitor the connection.

There’s a lot of marketing guff out there (not exclusive to IDNet) that purports all sorts of stuff.

Broadband is not military grade. Claiming such is pure spin / puffery / [censored].

Even a single leased line at a ten times cost multiple of broadband is far from “military grade”….it needs a hell of a lot more resilience, dual or triple routing and homing before it even gets anywhere close to being resilient.

The only thing that matters is what they are contractually obliged to provide and do and what your protections are via Ofcom.

Your expectations are simply way too high for a consumer or small business broadband service. Sorry.

Edited by Pheasant (Sat 16-Apr-22 22:24:57)

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

There’s a lot of marketing guff out there (not exclusive to IDNet) that purports all sorts of stuff.

Broadband is not military grade. Claiming such is pure spin / puffery / [censored].

Even a single leased line at a ten times cost multiple of broadband is far from “military grade”….it needs a hell of a lot more resilience, dual or triple routing and homing before it even gets anywhere close to being resilient.

The only thing that matters is what they are contractually obliged to provide and do and what your protections are via Ofcom.

Your expectations are simply way too high for a consumer or small business broadband service. Sorry.

So is your point that the average lay punter can expect to be hoodwinked by the expectations they have based on the marketing guff? If so, it does not reflect at all well on the whole iT infrastructure in this country and implies that the "professionals" want to hide behind the "fact" that they have been ambushed by a birthday cake at the marketeers' party.

In reply to a post by behuk:

This isn't what I expect from a "Military Grade Network" which claims to be "the most reliable" -- I'd expect them to have a culture of continuous improvement and to always strive for the minimum amount of downtime.

The "Military Grade Network" claim is for security not reliability. Under that heading it's the usual "most reliable".

I can't say how accurate that is, but I've never had any significant problem with them.

Edited by billford (Sun 17-Apr-22 08:32:34)

In reply to a post by billford:

........I've never had any significant problem with them.

FWIW neither have I in the 12 years or so that I've been with them

I had to do a bit of hunting to find when I joined... oldest invoice on the customer portal is 2006, which is even longer ago than I thought it was!

Only once really thought seriously about migrating away, and that turned out to be a mis-configuration on a Zen (backhaul) server. Never lost connection because of it, but single-thread speeds were appalling, and getting worse. Real pig to find, apparently.