Neotel have requested two maintenance windows this weekend, both of which Rhodes & TENET have refused.
The first was for Saturday morning between 7AM and 11AM. The purpose of this outage was to change Rhodes' access circuit from terminating in their Belleville (Cape Town) point-of-presence to the North End (Port Elizabeth) point-of-presence. This change was suggested in response to our recent complaints about service availability and is, on the face of it, a very good idea. We refused the change request on the basis that we believe the planning for it was very rushed, and that this would likely lead to implementation mistakes. We've suggested they schedule this for next weekend. As soon as we have firm details of a revised proposal, we'll make them available.
The second, mentioned previously, was for Sunday morning between 7AM and 11AM. This request was passed on from Infraco/Eskom and was to allow maintenance on power lines around the Blanco (George) sub-station. We've refused it on the basis that our circuit does not appear to be protected, and that this would cause an outage outside of the standard maintenance window.
We have a contractual right of refusal, and as a result these changes should not take place. Experience shows, however, that refusals are sometimes ignored. We therefore consider ourselves to be at risk for unscheduled Internet outages during the two aforementioned periods. If such outages do occur we will consider them incidents rather than scheduled maintenance, and will treat them as such.