Outage in Farnboprough Hampshire

See: http://status.zensupport.co.uk/active/5/3430

It looks as though Zen FTTC subscribers on 01252 numbers have been without internet services for 12 or more hours now. In the affected area it is ONLY Zen subscribers that are without a service.

So what could it be that covers such a wide geographic area with a number of exchanges involved that doesn't affect other ISPs? This looks serious with a long outage period to look forward to. Had to shut the office down and send staff home.

Any thoughts anyone?

GEA gives you a parent and child relationship between exchanges. In this case, Farnborough could be the parent, and the rest of them children. This means that the ISP just needs to build to the parent exchange, in order to connect to subs on the children exchanges.

I would guess something has gone wrong with either the equipment in the exchange, or the backhaul to it that is provided by C&WW.

In reply to a post by Geordish:

GEA gives you a parent and child relationship between exchanges. In this case, Farnborough could be the parent, and the rest of them children. This means that the ISP just needs to build to the parent exchange, in order to connect to subs on the children exchanges.

I would guess something has gone wrong with either the equipment in the exchange, or the backhaul to it that is provided by C&WW.

Finally came back on at 14:30 - a 14 hour outage; must have been one hell of a problem!

Glad to hear you are back online

In reply to a post by trolleybus:

Any thoughts anyone?

Depending on the size of your business perhaps you should look at alternate/backup solutions as it sounds like internet access is critical to your business where you mentioned closing and sending staff home?

There was a major outage on the supplier network. This should all be fixed and no further issues should be seen.

In reply to a post by b4dger:

Glad to hear you are back online

In reply to a post by trolleybus:

Any thoughts anyone?

Depending on the size of your business perhaps you should look at alternate/backup solutions as it sounds like internet access is critical to your business where you mentioned closing and sending staff home?

It is indeed and our earlier [very slow] Virgin service continues to be available and was brought into use for selective devices. Sending staff home is the best option as they continue to be able to operate their more efficiently on a faster connection and have access to the Company's cloud based services. We use VoIP, so from our clients perspective, they wouldn't know that we were operating at alternative locations.

The Zen outage of at least 14 hours didn't affect POTS on the broadband line, just the FTTC service. Somewhere up the food chain there was a pinch point with no alternative routing available; in my book that really isn't good enough. Of course compensation for loss of service isn't provided either.

In reply to a post by trolleybus:

Somewhere up the food chain there was a pinch point with no alternative routing available; in my book that really isn't good enough. Of course compensation for loss of service isn't provided either.

Eventually your single Zen connection is going to have to connect into a single device providing connectivity. If that fails then you're going to be without service until it gets replaced. This is the same with any other ISP, and the only way around it is to provide a second connection into your premises that connects to a different device.

Providing completely diverse paths into an exchange means you are doubling your backhaul costs. This may not be cost effective, especially with low numbers of subscribers on an exchange. Additionally a lot of exchanges - especially the smaller ones - only have a single duct going into them. This means that is pretty much impossible to provide any serious kind of redundancy as Jim with his JCB can cut through all the fibres going through that single duct in one fell swoop.

At the end of the day consumer grade DSL services are cheap. They will suffer outages from time to time. If you require guaranteed service (although it appears you can get by when suffering an outage) then you need a second circuit, ideally going to a completely separate exchange.