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Late night downtime common with AltNets?

jon1

ULTIMATE Member
Just wondering if Box Broadbands repetitive downtime is a common thing with other AltNets

Was up late myself migrating some services to new servers and the internet cut out again with no warning to “upgrade equipment”, this happens either planned or unplanned atleast twice a month, would atleast expect a warning email or SMS tbh

Is this common with other altnets? In terms of uptime my FTTC line had 2 or 3 incidents in the time I had it, BoxBroadband has had multipliers of this in only a few months, some of the time being full network outages and not area specific, but I understand they are a new product
 
In terms of uptime my FTTC line had 2 or 3 incidents in the time I had it,
network, and platform maturity would be the answer here. Also BT backhaul is highly resilient usually, so can often re-route traffic with little impact if they're working on backhaul. (Altnets likely don't have that luxury, as it's expensive and doesn't get you more customers)

Early on, regular maintenance was extremely common (often starting at 00:01 and lasting a few hours) on BT products. They'd flag dialing codes normally but it wasn't publicly available without tools showing you them this public (ISPs had access to the info, though).

Obviously all depends on the provider, and what work they're doing. If it's a new network area and you jumped on straight away, they may be adding resilience or have found some issues with equipment that needs swapping. The "fuller" network outages is likely them trying to mature their network looking at their size.

Have you been in contact with Box ? Would be interested to see what they'd have to say.
 
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My OctaPlus dropped for like 5 minutes around 11pm or near then.

It does sometimes but never causes a real pain.
 
Just wondering if Box Broadbands repetitive downtime is a common thing with other AltNets

Was up late myself migrating some services to new servers and the internet cut out again with no warning to “upgrade equipment”, this happens either planned or unplanned atleast twice a month, would atleast expect a warning email or SMS tbh

Is this common with other altnets? In terms of uptime my FTTC line had 2 or 3 incidents in the time I had it, BoxBroadband has had multipliers of this in only a few months, some of the time being full network outages and not area specific, but I understand they are a new product
It is common across the industry to get drops every so often overnight with differing frequencies, unless on a leased line which would be less prone to drops. Zen (with them via back-haul with IDNET) would drop the connection every week or two over night and I never got any warning, this I think was for load balancing.

With A&A now and there have been quite a few drops recently over night for router updates and config changes, and a few drops during the day due to their router crashing which of course causes more inconvenience. Think I managed 100 days on A&A of up-time but that's never been repeated! I do out of hours updates to systems myself from home but usually never in the early hours of the morning when ISP drops seem to happen.

A newish altnet is probably not going to be any different, and quite likely worse as you are finding. Personally I don't think most altnets exist to provide a reliable service, it's about financing and investments and creating a company with some sort of assets to be sold later.
 
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Overnight maintenance is fairly common, I wouldn't expect much in the way of notifications or an outage window on a broadband service either.
 
Overnight maintenance is fairly common, I wouldn't expect much in the way of notifications or an outage window on a broadband service either.
I would imagine in todays age that you could easily just send a quick "Hey! No internet for 3 hours starting 2am tonight" to affected customers, but maybe it's not standard

Their worst outage was during a football final at 7pm (Unlucky Sky Stream user) and was network wide for 5 hours
 
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Overnight maintenance is fairly common, I wouldn't expect much in the way of notifications or an outage window on a broadband service either.
They could put info on a service status page, they must know what work they are going to do overnight, and for any customer doing anything important out of hours could check.

Some ISPs manage it, A&A have a great service status page and give prior warning as well as some technical info about what is happening or upcoming https://aastatus.net/timeline-view.cgi
 
They could put info on a service status page, they must know what work they are going to do overnight, and for any customer doing anything important out of hours could check.

Some ISPs manage it, A&A have a great service status page and give prior warning as well as some technical info about what is happening or upcoming https://aastatus.net/timeline-view.cgi
Sure. it's a nice to have, and A&A are known for having excellent service and is priced accordingly. I'm saying that I wouldn't expect it as standard with a broadband service that I am paying under £40 for.

7pm outages are a different matter and sounds more likely to be a fault than maintenance.
 
Sure. it's a nice to have, and A&A are known for having excellent service and is priced accordingly. I'm saying that I wouldn't expect it as standard with a broadband service that I am paying under £40 for.

7pm outages are a different matter and sounds more likely to be a fault than maintenance.
Indeed you do pay for the service, but lots of ISPs do have service status pages, it benefits the ISP as well if people aren't calling in when there is some outage. Whilst lots of ISPs do have service status pages, they don't always report problems in a timely manner or show overnight maintenance though.

I don't think cost is an excuse not to keep your customers updated with a simple page showing outages. I'm sure your £40 a month ISP has no problems notifying all their customers when they want to put the prices up :)
 
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It can be frustrating when the internet cuts out unexpectedly, especially when you're in the middle of something important. I haven't tried other AltNets, so I can't compare, but it does seem like Box Broadband has had more downtime than what I'm used to with traditional ISPs.
 
Resilience will become the main topic here once the "gold rush" is over along with their routing and latency. Unexpected downtime or ability to recover from significant failure or damage.

Full fibre will be reliable but can fail. If uptime is important then a business package that has SLAs may reduce the downtime risk and a dual source of two slower Broadband products (fixed or mobile) load balanced instead of one very fast FF package is advised. But a PIA ISP + OR ISP does not equal resilience against damage.
 
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Just wondering if Box Broadbands repetitive downtime is a common thing with other AltNets

Was up late myself migrating some services to new servers and the internet cut out again with no warning to “upgrade equipment”, this happens either planned or unplanned atleast twice a month, would atleast expect a warning email or SMS tbh

Is this common with other altnets? In terms of uptime my FTTC line had 2 or 3 incidents in the time I had it, BoxBroadband has had multipliers of this in only a few months, some of the time being full network outages and not area specific, but I understand they are a new product
It seems to be becoming common practice on non cable ISPs, I expect its more likely with younger networks.

Sky developed a habit of doing it, so I left them, AAISP do it as well but not very often, they will also notify you and allow you to pick the hour of your outage on the maintenance night.

TTB were doing it a crap ton which got so bad it led to me being requested to move to BTw.

Out of all of the above only AAISP has the professional approach, I think its been a race to the bottom where it seems its considered ok now to do unannounced frequent maintenance on consumer products.

Thankfully VM are so much better in this area, I think I have had 2 hub5 firmware updates, a few failed updates, and maybe one or two other outages and thats it in 13 months, both of those outages I was also notified in advance..
 
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