internet How often should my connection be "down for maintainence"?

[M A J O R]

I'm with Telstra here in AUS. They're one of the main ISPs in the country. My question is, how often does my internet connection need to be turned off for maintainence?

 

My connection is being cut on average once a week, sometimes more often, sometimes a week without any issue.

 

These outages are often for the entire working day. Is this acceptable/normal? I can't help but feel this should only be happening for a few hours maybe once a month.

 

Thoughts?

[amdorintel]

yeah it seems mine is down a lot as well. seems like 3 times a month at midnight or 1am

its getting riduculous to say the least

it should be down for maybe 3 times a year at most

 

[Vishera]

It depends on how modern and how well built the infrastructure of the ISP.

They are saving money by fixing old and worn components instead of replacing them completely with new ones, they also save money by not updating their infrastructure.

They probably wait for things to break instead of inspecting the infrastructure regularly.

 

My ISP doesn't do all of this BS,i have never had an outage before,

I guess it's because my ISP is focused on keeping the infrastructure modern,inspects the infrastructure regularly and doesn't wait for things to break,the whole infrastructure of my ISP is Optic Fiber.

[M A J O R]

22 minutes ago, amdorintel said:

yeah it seems mine is down a lot as well. seems like 3 times a month at midnight or 1am

its getting riduculous to say the least

it should be down for maybe 3 times a year at most

 

Mine's usually during business hours.

[Vishera]

Just now, M A J O R said:

Mine's usually during business hours.

That means your ISP doesn't have the bandwidth to handle customers using the service,That's a whole new level of being cheap,

If the infrastructure doesn't have enough bandwidth to handle all of the customers,they shouldn't have let them sign up to the service from the beginning.

They can upgrade the infrastructure for more bandwidth but seems like they are too cheap to do that.

[TetraSky]

I've received an email once, to tell me that they will do maintenance on their network and that during that time, speeds may be affected but we shouldn't lose the network access entirely... and it was scheduled for 3am.

That happened once. In the last 10 years.

 

If the entire connection goes down for "maintenance", it means they cheaped out on the infrastructure and simply can't balance customers to different machines/servers while they do maintenance on one thing.

[GDRRiley]

I can't think of a time for internet.

I've had my sat TV go down at times when its super rainy outside.

[TetraSky]

Just now, GDRRiley said:

I've had my sat TV go down at times when its super rainy outside.

Yeaaaah that's no fault of the service itself, sat TV needs clear view to the satellite. Huge rain clouds will block that. No way around it other than using cables.

[amdorintel]

15 minutes ago, M A J O R said:

Mine's usually during business hours.

that would piss every business off!

[Vishera]

1 minute ago, TetraSky said:

I've received an email once, to tell me that they will do maintenance on their network and that during that time, speeds may be affected but we shouldn't lose the network access entirely... and it was scheduled for 3am.

That happened once. In the last 10 years.

That's how it suppose to be if the infrastructure is good.

 

I have heard that the infrastructure in Australia is pretty bad.

[Bombastinator]

3 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

Yeaaaah that's no fault of the service itself, sat TV needs clear view to the satellite. Huge rain clouds will block that. No way around it other than using cables.

Oh ye of little faith

[M A J O R]

Is there anything I can do as a customer? Or should we just be switching service?

[Vishera]

Just now, M A J O R said:

Is there anything I can do as a customer? Or should we just be switching service?

You can threaten them that you are sick of the outages and if you will get one more outage you will switch to the competition,it might scare them and magically fix it.

If threatening them doesn't work then simply switch to an ISP that doesn't have those problems,before that check the worst reviews and comments - they show the worst case scenario.

And if an ISP has Optic Fiber in your area,it indicates that the infrastructure is at least modern.

[NineEyeRon]

What does the agreement with them say about uptime?

[Polyvalent]

55 minutes ago, Vishera said:

You can threaten them that you are sick of the outages and if you will get one more outage you will switch to the competition,it might scare them and magically fix it.

If threatening them doesn't work then simply switch to an ISP that doesn't have those problems,before that check the worst reviews and comments - they show the worst case scenario.

And if an ISP has Optic Fiber in your area,it indicates that the infrastructure is at least modern.

man it must be nice to be in an area with more than one ISP

 

[Vishera]

25 minutes ago, Polyvalent said:

man it must be nice to be in an area with more than one ISP

In my country there are anti-monopoly laws and encouragement of competition.

[Polyvalent]

10 minutes ago, Vishera said:

In my country there are anti-monopoly laws and encouragement of competition.

Oh, those are supposed to do something? In my country they're just for show

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, M A J O R said:

Is there anything I can do as a customer? Or should we just be switching service?

Are you on the NBN or still on an ADSL service.

 

If you are on NBN,  planned maintenance should only happen once every few months.  I am with Aussiebroadband and they do regular service every couple of months but I get an email well in advance and they do it in the early hours of the morning.  Outages during the day are not maintenance but usually NBN related and don;t have much to do with your RSP (ISP under their new name).

 

If you are on adsl then their is likely not much you can do, try another ISP but depending where you are you might get an even worse experience.

 

43 minutes ago, Polyvalent said:

man it must be nice to be in an area with more than one ISP

 

On the NBN we have over 150 options for ISP (they are called RSP's technically), the only difference between them is how they manage their company and thus your experience.  The technical limits and infrastructure of the internet is all handled by NBN so every RSP has the same playing field. 

[Vishera]

11 minutes ago, Polyvalent said:

Oh, those are supposed to do something? In my country they're just for show

It all depends on the ability of the government to efficiently govern and focus on what really matters.

Political conflicts and corruption can easily make a government focus on political conflicts and corruption,it's a vicious cycle.

[Kisai]

8 hours ago, M A J O R said:

I'm with Telstra here in AUS. They're one of the main ISPs in the country. My question is, how often does my internet connection need to be turned off for maintainence?

 

My connection is being cut on average once a week, sometimes more often, sometimes a week without any issue.

 

These outages are often for the entire working day. Is this acceptable/normal? I can't help but feel this should only be happening for a few hours maybe once a month.

 

Thoughts?

 

Ideally? Never. Reasonable? maybe 10 minutes, per month, at 3am.

 

Like Telus here in BC, Metro Vancouver is basically never out. Shaw, not so much. I've been to people's places with Shaw that seems to be out more often, but it doesn't help that they're 100km away from the major city.

 

So if you're 300km away from the closest city, it's probably not unreasonable to expect maintenance issues. I've been to Alaska, it's never that bad, it's just expensive.

 

[Bombastinator]

5 hours ago, Polyvalent said:

man it must be nice to be in an area with more than one ISP

 

Obama tried to go after that practice in the US.  He got stopped.

[Jarsky]

Are you on NBN? I've heard horror stories from friends there on NBN that have the same issue.

The way the network is built, much of the maintenance done at the infrastructure level takes down a large portion of the network. 

 

From what I understand the government and Telstra have cheaped out a fair bit and don't have the diversity we have heree in New Zealand.

Essentially the only time your connection is down for maintenance is when they're doing an upgrade on your POLT / DSLAM, which might be about 5 minutes every 6 months or so around 2am-4am. Or the odd time they're grooming connections from 1 cabinet to another, which is about the same frequency. 

 

You also need to factor in any maintenance your RSP (Retail Service Provider) might be doing as well, but typically they're able to move traffic to mitigate outages during most maintenance. 

 

The fact its during business hours though is a huge red flag that you might actually have a fault. 

Maintenance should *not* be done during the day or evening, and especially should not take an entire day.

[Donut417]

8 hours ago, Vishera said:

In my country there are anti-monopoly laws and encouragement of competition.

We have those in the US. They don’t do shit. When the telecoms pump enough money in to the government they can pretty much get away with bending the customers over. 

[mr moose]

13 hours ago, Vishera said:

It all depends on the ability of the government to efficiently govern and focus on what really matters.

Political conflicts and corruption can easily make a government focus on political conflicts and corruption,it's a vicious cycle.

 

5 hours ago, Donut417 said:

We have those in the US. They don’t do shit. When the telecoms pump enough money in to the government they can pretty much get away with bending the customers over. 

Lucky for us in Australia that our ACCC, Justice  system, etc are all very well isolated from the government.  Especially in comparison to other countries.  We often have the ACCC taking corporations to court and winning,  and the high court overturn government policy (forcing them to drop it or take it back the parliament and have the entire parliament change the laws).

[M A J O R]

15 hours ago, mr moose said:

Are you on the NBN or still on an ADSL service.

 

If you are on NBN,  planned maintenance should only happen once every few months.  I am with Aussiebroadband and they do regular service every couple of months but I get an email well in advance and they do it in the early hours of the morning.  Outages during the day are not maintenance but usually NBN related and don;t have much to do with your RSP (ISP under their new name).

 

If you are on adsl then their is likely not much you can do, try another ISP but depending where you are you might get an even worse experience.

 

On the NBN we have over 150 options for ISP (they are called RSP's technically), the only difference between them is how they manage their company and thus your experience.  The technical limits and infrastructure of the internet is all handled by NBN so every RSP has the same playing field. 

That's good to know, I'm on NBN so I might investigate my options there. Telstra in notoriously bad for customer experience so it would be nice to have some choice.