In light of the prolonged Internet outages on Friday and Tuesday, Rhodes will be approving an emergency maintenance request from Neotel that's scheduled to take place during the evening on Wednesday 21 October. The exact timing of this maintenance are as yet unknown, and will be posted here in due course.
This maintenance will likely result in another Internet outage for Rhodes, albeit planned this time. Users will likely experience the outage as an ERR_DNS_FAIL or ERR_CONNECT_FAIL error when trying to access websites hosted off campus.
The reason we're approving this maintenance is that it'll move Rhodes' circuit off Neotel's point of presence in Belleville (and hence off the faulty Port Elizabeth - Cape Town fibre) and onto Neotel's point of presence in Port Elizabeth. This change will increase the redundancy of our Internet access circuit and reduce the length of unprotected circuit. It should also mitigate against the repeated failures of Neotel/Infraco's fibre in and around George, by providing an alternative route via Durban.