Rhodes has given Neotel consent to perform scheduled maintenance on our Internet connection on Sunday 7 February 2010. Neotel will commence work at 5AM and should be finished by 10AM. During this time, you can expect intermittent access to the Internet. Users will most likely experience the outage as an ERR_DNS_FAIL or ERR_CONNECT_FAIL error when trying to access remote websites.
The purpose of this work is to perform a permanent repair on a fibre optic cable in Port Elizabeth. This cable was temporarily spliced some time ago, and is apparently now in imminent danger of failing. There are apparently two joins to make, and each will take around two hours to complete.
The reason this work has to be done during daylight hours, rather than during their normal midnight to 6AM maintenance window is that it involves some mast work -- for health and safety reasons, climbing masts can only be done during daylight hours. We've asked Neotel to do as much of the preparatory work as possible during the maintenance period, and to restrict their daylight work to only the bare essentials.