On Sunday 3rd June, starting at 8AM, Telkom will be upgrading the router that supplies South African universities with their Internet access. During the upgrade, users at Rhodes will be unable to access the Internet. Telkom anticipate that the outage will last no longer than an hour.
The upgrade is necessary because of increased load on the TENET international and stacker routers caused by the growth in traffic on the network. Due to the complexity of this upgrade, a decision was taken between TENET and Telkom to do this upgrade outside of the standard maintenance window, in a time slot that would ensure the availability of people should anything go wrong. Telkom has assured TENET that they have done everything they can to ensure that this upgrade will go as smoothly as possible, and have already migrated the configurations onto the new routing engines, so in theory this should just be a line card swap.