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Cityfibre Reliability

rtho782

Regular Member
Cityfibre supposedly have a "fully redundant" network.

Ipswich (yes, the whole town) went offline at 0115 on the 11th Nov, and was restored just over 24 hours later. At the time I was with Giganet, who were pretty useless, taking over 1hr 20m to answer the phone on saturday.

It turned out to be a fibre break, Yayzi posted an update on their status page which still shows now: https://yayzibroadband.site24x7statusiq.eu/

It was restored about 0120 on the 12th Nov, so a little over 24 hours later.

13th was migration day, I was supposed to move to Yayzi with an engineer visit 0800-1200 (to replace ONT, going to a >1G service). CF never turned up. Yayzi managed to activate me sans visit at about 1445, so I was offline for another ~14.5 hours. Still no 2.5g ONT, not quite sure what is happening there, apparently as my connection is "committed" rather than "completed" there is nothing that can be done right now.

Now on the 15th, CF are down again (apparently for all of Ipswich again) from ~1900.

Yayzi tell me that CF support for them stops at 1700. So they aren't really sure what is going on.

At this point the whole lack of support is a bit of a joke. At least Yayzi respond to me, but can a wholesale network really be run on a 9-5 basis? Is this amount of downtime really acceptable?

Annoyingly it's this or Vermin Media for me, but I'm seriously contemplating switching back.
 
Unless you're supporting critical business or safety critical operations then in reality the edge of the network is rarely resilient. Resilience is usually practical to provide beyond the last mile / edge network where you get to some aspect of aggregation as you're heading towards the core.

If as you suggest the whole of Ipswich was offline it does appear that there is a lack of resilience there... You would expect there to be two independent paths and two pieces of independent or resilient equipment between the core network and the Ipswich aggregation node, and it would not be expected for a single failure to cut off somewhere like Ipswich.

I would be tempted to ask for a technical reason for outage and what plans are in place to prevent such a similar lengthy and widespread outage. ISPs and networks don't want their customers to be cut off and you will frequently find that they redouble their efforts to ensure the same issue doesn't occur again, double checking resilience, testing it again, validating documentation, etc. You will probably end up on the most resilient bit of the CityFibre network once they've gone through their outage review...
 
Honestly there is an element of trying to decipher truth from the things isps are telling me to try to placate me.

The first 24hr outage was due to a fibre break. Giganet confirmed this, Yayzi did on their status page, etc. This one I feel is worrying, and did affect all of Ipswich, it was all over nextdoor etc.

Since then, I think now it's all down to CityFibres inability to support migrations which I'm pretty sure must break some Ofcom rules.

Giganet then cut me off just gone midnight on the morning of the 13th due to the cease (there is no GPL migration process, you have to cease and order for the same day), and CF engineers did not turn up between 0800-1200 as booked due to standard CF incompetence. Engineers were needed as the new ONT was needed due to the service regrade.

Yayzi got me working in the afternoon of the 13th, on the old speed. My order didnt show as completed in their control panel. This then cut off at 1900 on the 15th. I've now concluded this was CF completing the Giganet cease (giganet likely just stopping pppoe auth).

Yayzi initially told me it was ipswich wide again, but that they couldn't confirm or report the fault until 0900 today as CF close support at 1700. Today I've been given the runaround (surely you will get the internet) but have had a text saying they are sending an engineer tomorrow, so I assume I'm going to be without Internet for another night and it will provision tomorrow.

Honestly, the migration process is an utter mess. I think that's the root of all my issues since the first outage. I'm not happy about the lack of info and conflicting info I've received, and the fact that I have to depend on what Yayzi tell me and have no way to talk to CF.

When I move I think I will be looking for a vertically integrated supplier.
 
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FYI

I get alerts as I used to work for a partner with CF

1700251879788.webp
 
Still waiting for mine - But then I guess 1 GBPS should be enough just for me.
 
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I've definitely seen more outages since swapping from Openreach's FTTC to CityFibre's FTTP, and they often last longer, too. But the 5G backup SIM I've got has been fine during those periods, although reliability in terms of uptime is certainly an area where CF's network could do with a bit of improvement.

FTTC was slow and had plenty of caveats, but I typically only saw one real outage a year, and it usually only lasted 1-2 hours at most. By comparison, I've seen about 4 on CityFibre this year, and 3 of those lasted several times longer. The cause of these was all on the CityFibre side, rather than that of the ISP.
 
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