Neotel has just requested our consent to make a non-service-affecting change to some of the equipment that provides our Internet access during the course of this afternoon or tomorrow. We've given them preliminary permission to do so, and are awaiting final confirmation of the timing.
Whilst the change they're proposing does not directly affect our Internet connection, the fact that they're working on the equipment responsible for providing this connection means that we will be at increased risk of an Internet outage. In the unlikely event that this does happen, we'll treat the matter as any other unscheduled Internet outage.
What Neotel have proposed is the creation of a second virtual circuit between our AMM data centre and their PoP in Port Elizabeth, independent of and in parallel with the existing virtual circuit to Cape Town. This new circuit can then be configured and tested without affecting our Internet access. If successful, this should go some way towards resolving the problems they've had in re-routing our connection from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth. In particular, it should drastically shorten the time this change takes to complete (to ~ 5 minutes) and may mean that we can schedule it for late one evening this week.