noticeboard.ru.ac.za

At about 3:15 AM today, we lost access to the Internet for reasons as yet unknown. You will likely experience this outage as an ERR_DNS_FAIL or ERR_CONNECT_FAIL error when trying to access websites. When accessing secure (https://) web sites, your browser may report that the connection has timed out or the site is unreachable.

We've reported this outage to TENET's service desk and are awaiting feedback.

We've heard back from TENET's service desk. We're told that the problem lies between Melkhout and Louterwater yet again, but that Eskom technicians are on site to repair the problem. No estimated time to repair has been given.

It seems that the re-routing change (and previously) that Neotel was supposed to have been made was not made, and we are still experiencing outages as a result of problems in the Southern Cape.

We've just had confirmation that this is in fact the case. Our routing remains unchanged.

There are two separate issues currently playing out here. There's an Internet outage that's currently affecting us, and there's an underlying service delivery problem that's the root cause these repeated outages.

This will be the second month in a row where Neotel fail to meet their service availability targets by a substantial margin, and the 11th time they've missed the target during the 26 months of the present contract. Of more concern is Neotel's repeated failure to implement the service improvement actions that were promised October last year and their failure to adequately communicate the reasons for this. As a result I've just asked TENET's service manager to escalate the service delivery matter within TENET and to ask their CEO take it up at a senior executive level within Neotel. This is the highest possible level of escalation under the GEN3 contract, and beyond the normal escalation for incidents.

Whilst we don't expect that this will have any bearing on our current outage, we're hoping it will force Neotel to urgently reconfigure Rhodes' access circuit to terminate in Port Elizabeth rather than Belleville (as they undertook to do in October last year and have failed to complete in two consecutive maintenance windows in the last two weeks). In this regard, as a matter of principle and because of the ongoing inconvenience these outages have caused, we will refuse any requests for changes outside the normal contractual maintenance window (Sundays, midnight to 6AM).

We've just heard feedback from Neotel that cable splicing is in progress.