Enta's Report of Kingston Outage

[linker3000]

Is see that Enta has written up a 'matter of fact' report on the Kingston outage, but has not touched upon several points - notably:

1) Why a whole POP can be taken down by a fibre patch fault.

2) Why an engineer was dispatched from Telford to drive to Kingston - that's 164 frikkin miles in 3 hours according to the AA - rather than there being a local service presence for a key installation. FFS - Even I'm nearer in West Sussex and could have been there with a full network engineering kit, including spare fibre patch leads, in about 1.5 hours.

3) Why between them, the Enta and NTL engineers did not carry sufficient spare kit - in this case a fibre patch lead - to repair the fault, leading to them taking one from the WBC service (cutting off all WBC-connected users) to fix the fault. That's so stupid it's laughable. Jeez - I have only three cabinets of kit to manage at Head office and there's at least one spare Cat 5e lead and fibre patch hooked over a cable tray arm in each one 'just in case'.

4) Why, overall, an MSO (Major Systems Outage) lasted around 7 hours when the ultimate fix was a 1 minute job to replace a fibre patch lead.

5) What they are doing to remedy this pisspoor response to a simple fault and to ensure that such a fault is fixed within a reasonable period of time - and for a key data centre this should be about 5 minutes, 15 if an engineer has to be called out.

The root cause of the fault has not been directly spelled out, but it seems to have been caused by some fibre work being undertaken in the same cabinet, which raises the question of where the hell did *that* engineer go, who was that engineer, who did they work for and why did they not notice they had left a tray cover open and either damaged or accidentally disconnected a fibre link?

I suppose I have to direct these questions through James as I am an ADSL24 customer, but I would like some answers from Enta - especially since we have two ADSL24 links 'on trial' and it was a long-term intention to consider moving these and around 30 others to one supplier (they are currently split between BT and Zen), but on the strength of evidence that leads me to the conclusion that Enta's networing technical ability could be bettered by a team of Kwik Fit fitters, I doubt if anyone tied to Entanet will get the business - which would be a shame as James and his team are constantly battling the challenges created for them by Enta, yet they do the absolute best with what they have got to offer.

James, I have to ask: Have the resellers officialy met, or had words, with Enta about this incident? Any response? Do they care? Do they acknowledge the response to the MSO was a complete farce?

Yours - not happy, and I am a tolerant person.

Linker3000

[Jules]

Agreed - questions to be answered. Afterall, it was a fault late morning midweek - i.e. in peak hours at a time when you'd expect a good team to be readily available. It's not as if it were in the middle of the night and someone had to be woken up and called out from miles away. This Kingston - is it the London one I know well? Or is it perhaps Kingston-upon-Hull? My point is, if it's London, with all the other interconnects and other data infrastructure in the area, surely there was an engineer not far away? Good answers and reassurances about the future are needed if confidence in Entanet as an ISP of choice for businesses is to be maintained.

Or, seeing the timing of the fault was a bit before noon on 1st April, this wasn't some disgruntled employee's sick idea of an April Fool, was it?

[linker3000]

...This Kingston - is it the London one I know well? Or is it perhaps Kingston-upon-Hull?

This was at Kingston-upon-Thames.

Heck, having worked a few times in the Kingston-upon-Hull site, I can say that if a cable fault occurred there, there would be half a ton of engineers within the building able to pop over, fix it and be back in the canteen within minutes.

[21cn]

Surprised it wasn't the usual 'attempted theft of equipment' excuse. At least we got some photo's :rolleyes:

[James]

linker - I have taken your exact questions and raised this with our account manager as they basically echo our own feelings. Once I get a reply to each of the questions I will reply here.

[garry]

has it taken more than 3 days to get an answer from enta?:o

[hornedrat]

i imagine that enta are having to have meetings to discuss all of these issues and work out the best way to pass the blame...

[Berwhale]

I was working from home when this outage occurred. It was a major inconvenience as I could do very little work all day.

I was WFH again yesterday and there was another outage of 20-25 minutes around 15:30. My router managed to re-authenticate by 16:00 (the line never droped). There's no mention of it on the NOC page.