Neotel have just informed us that we will experience an Internet outage during their scheduled maintenance window on Sunday 12 July 2009. The outage will commence at 10AM and should be completed by 3PM.
During the outage all users may be unable to browse the web or access other resources on the Internet. They will most likely experience this as an ERR_DNS_FAIL or ERR_CONNECT_FAIL error when trying to access affected web sites. E-mail that's sent or received during the outage will be queued, and will be delivered once Internet access restored.
You're strongly advised to plan around this scheduled maintenance work.
The background to this outage is as follows: as a result of bad weather in and around Grahamstown, one of the microwave antennae that supplies Rhodes with Internet access was damaged. This resulted in a number of Internet outages last week. Neotel wish to repair the damage and stabilize the antennae to prevent this problem from recurring. To do this, they need good weather and daylight. Neotel originally requested that the change happen this weekend but, as a result of the National Arts Festival, we've explicitly asked them to defer the work by a week.