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'Major' outage at Plusnet borks Brits' browsing, irate folk finger DNS

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

> Then again, it can be nasty when it strikes.

FWIW, I've seen worse !

We had a few customer FTTC connections with Vodafone, and performance was utterly carp. Variable, but generally carp. Luckily here in the office, we also have our leased line we can switch to if the FTTC line we normally use for the office traffic is poorly - not much help for our customers.

Through use of mtr (effectively traceroute) I identified that there was just one node in Vodamoan's network that was causing all the problems - but "nothing could be done" other than migrating lines and that would need new IPs yada yada yada. This went on for about 8 months and they were still not ready to issue new logins/IPs.

Then last month a tsunami of traffic hit the internet - aka Windows 10 was launched. Our own FTTC line more or less died (it had generally been better than our customers), and several of our customers effectively had no connectivity on the Monday morning. It eased a bit, but was bad again on Wed morning when MS released a big patch. And still it was just one node in Vodamoan's network causing the problem.

But, it got so bad that our leased line was affected - and I diagnosed that this too went via the same node although traffic on it had never been affected. As this line has an SLA, and they were out of it, they were actually talking to us ! But it was still "well we did mention that you'll be having to migrate (with new IPs) at some point"*, and "sorry we can't fix it". We didn't take that lying down. I don't know who our account manager talked to, but next morning both our lines were working just fine, and so were our customers' FTTC lines - traceroute shows that they no longer went through this congested node.

So for 8 months Vodamoan had effectively refused to fix a known fault - I suspect because it's in a bit of "legacy" network they don't want to invest in. It just took a big enough fault - one they'd have to pay compo for - and they "found a way to fix it".

* Actually, they hadn't, it was no more than a passing "BTW you might need to migrate sometime, but we don't know when" from our account manager during a chat about something else.

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