"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.

In reply to a post by GonePostal:

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.

It's true of all forms of advertising and marketing across all markets. This is why a wise person does everything they can to avoid it. Only technical specifications can be trusted - anything else is just guff.

Checking this IDNET forum and comparing it with the forums of providers that the overwhelming majority of people use reveals a consistent issue with reliability with IDNET.

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/isps/compare?isp_7=1&...

Thanks, Bill.

Along with other users in 2021 you posted of problems with your connection in April, May, October, November and December.

Although the dedication to IDNET is admirable, we just don't see this unreliability with the major providers.

In reply to a post by FibreBubble:

Along with other users in 2021 you posted of problems with your connection in April, May, October, November and December.

Yup, down to backhaul providers iirc. But memory could be failing, got the links to the posts to suggest otherwise?

The thread title got me interested. I have spent too much of my time as a specialist technical adviser on major contract deals listening to commercial and legal teams arguing over the obligations and risks attached to the terms ‘reasonable’ and ‘best’ endeavours. I haven’t looked at the contract ts and cs for IDNet but I would be surprised if best endeavours was its default position. In my experience, best endeavours usually comes at a higher contract price.

In reply to a post by lexden16:

I would be surprised if best endeavours was its default position.

Indeed:

In reference to www.idnet.com/terms-and-conditions.php:

2.3 Operational faults

We agree to use reasonable efforts to remedy any reported operational faults in relation to the Service as soon as reasonably possible, but cannot guarantee to maintain uninterrupted availability of the Service.

I hadn't read the T&Cs to that detail before, but had assumed it would be the case in view of the price for a consumer product.

The use of "best endeavours" in the email quote is surprising, although they may "unofficially" try to work to that.

As you say (sort of ), promising to bust a gut until it's fixed is expensive.

Edited by billford (Mon 18-Apr-22 10:04:57)

In reply to a post by lexden16:

The thread title got me interested. I have spent too much of my time as a specialist technical adviser on major contract deals listening to commercial and legal teams arguing over the obligations and risks attached to the terms ‘reasonable’ and ‘best’ endeavours. I haven’t looked at the contract ts and cs for IDNet but I would be surprised if best endeavours was its default position. In my experience, best endeavours usually comes at a higher contract price.

I am but an armchair lawyer, but I've always read 'reasonable' as implying that the cost of the product would be taken into account in resolving issues, whereas 'best endeavours' is closer to meaning that wads of cash are thrown at the window of a suitable engineer at 2am until they wake up and fix the problem. It implies that the supplier does not provide a higher level of service to any other client.

Edited by ft247 (Mon 18-Apr-22 11:44:55)

Unlike most 'home' providers, IDNet offer various care levels. If you are concerend you can sign up for 'critical' care, but expect to pay more than £38pm.

I think the issue is now "closed" with IDNet. They say:

In regards to disconnects, I cannot see anything to suggest a backhaul issue at this time, even if this was the case, there is no guarantee of uptime with the service, as previously mentioned it is a best endeavours product.

Given this appears to be a single line issue, I'm not going to push for further investigations. That being said, support did make another comment which concerned me:

If Openreach do not pass a notification of PEW (planned engineer works) onto our suppliers, we will be unaware of it I'm afraid. Unplanned works/ emergency works do not trigger a notification to be sent out, therefore there is no visibility on this from our end, we do not have a direct relationship with Openreach to ascertain this information.

Personally I'd expect (or at least hope!) that IDNet have their own monitoring in place to ensure that their products are performing as expected. I wouldn't expect them to monitor every broadband circuit, but monitoring (e.g.) backhaul circuits and raising a query with the supplier when unexpected downtime occurs seems fairly simple. That being said, I'm a software engineer, not a network engineer, so I'd be happy to learn why my suggestion would be infeasible.

To echo what other people have said, I feel you're expecting too much from a broadband service.

Staff checking logs for a one-off drop that lasted an hour and then recovered itself is what you get with a leased line service, along with proactive notifications of outages.

From the language being used it sounds like this was an overnight outage.

There might be some confusion here.

He isnt asking for a uptime SLA, just for communication.

In my business I give outage information to people who pay a fraction of UK broadband costs, I also get this type of information even for £5 month VPS's I have leased.

Any network service company who is run sensible will log every single outage, regardless if its planned or unplanned, the issue is why this information is not available, it could be Openreach and other suppliers choosing to not pass it on or it could be IDNET do have the information but its just not accessible by the tech support team. Sadly the "race to the bottom" dumbing down of broadband is seemingly even affecting IDNET who I guess at one point were considered a premium broadband provider.

For reference I had a burst of PPP outages last December, multiple times a week, I queried it with AAISP who came back to me with the reason (talktalk business upgrade work).

Also an hour outage is quite a long time, I would definitely expect an explanation for that, very different to a simple PPP off/on cycle.

In reply to a post by behuk:

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?

Not forgetting to others I am branded a Fantasist (Yawn) because I mentioned I have a TalkTalk Leased line - anyway they had no idea when my line went down - well not until the engineer came out which was about an hour later. But IDnet never got to that stage ad I think it's something like a 48-72 hour fix on FTTP? No idea just guessing of course.

I wouldn't expect them to know either. But nothing they have said seems unreasonable to me - I have been lead to understand FTTP does suffer less outages than anything copper based - so maybe it was just Hi Jinx?

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

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.

My "fantasy" leased line circuit provider - which was installed by a company called Openreach who I made up, and has a Circuit number I you will assume I just typed randomly on the keyboard and their system accepted it when I had to make the circuit go "LIVE" has 3 network paths from the Provider's MPLS core network. Of course I just made up MPLS core network from my Unicorn dictionary.

Oh no - i'm reading it right form my leased line CONTRACT - which you will assume is also fantasy and made up - but [censored] you in any case

OP - that I believe is something towards "being resilient" IDNet talk about the encryption I think when they go on about the grade

Edited by Username26 (Sun 08-May-22 16:15:55)

In reply to a post by lexden16:

The thread title got me interested. I have spent too much of my time as a specialist technical adviser on major contract deals listening to commercial and legal teams arguing over the obligations and risks attached to the terms ‘reasonable’ and ‘best’ endeavours. I haven’t looked at the contract ts and cs for IDNet but I would be surprised if best endeavours was its default position. In my experience, best endeavours usually comes at a higher contract price.

When you get into LL prices then it's guaranteed

In reply to a post by jpm:

To echo what other people have said, I feel you're expecting too much from a broadband service.

Staff checking logs for a one-off drop that lasted an hour and then recovered itself is what you get with a leased line service, along with proactive notifications of outages.

From the language being used it sounds like this was an overnight outage.

I can say with certainty that staff are on the phone within 20 minutes to speak to someone if there is an outage on a LL - I have said elsewhere I am on TalkTalk Business for my LL - so same network different deals. An engineer is raised within 30 minutes - we had a guy on the office door within about an hour after the fault was raised