TRANSITION

Yesterday, under duress, we completed a major transition. As of a few minutes before Noon, September 1st, we are backhauling service to Ripton through our own fiberoptic drop on Old Town Road. This eliminates the W. Cornwall wireless site which has been so problematic recently, causing the weekend outage of late July as well as a pair of much briefer interruptions.

Unfortunately, yesterday once again the W. Cornwall site owners failed to meet their contractual commitments; some of our equipment there was powered down a few minutes before midnight Monday night, even though there was an obligation to power it for another week. We had planned to announce a maintenance window in the early morning hours of either Wednesday or Thursday to complete the transfer during a time when an outage would have the least impact on our customers. As a result of the situation in W. Cornwall, we were forced to effect the transition on the fly Tuesday morning, and did not complete it until a few minutes before Noon.  All of our Ripton customers would have been unable to connect until then.

Please accept our sincere apologies for the difficulties of this transition, and thank you all for your loyalty.  Please know that these difficulties are behind us; the new fiber feed will be not only much more reliable, but is already bringing significantly more bandwidth up the mountain. It is also easily scalable, unlike the former path, so we can continue to increase bandwidth as the need arises. Additionally, we now begin work on implementing another high capacity wireless link into Ripton, so that we can provide a unique level of redundancy there.

We will continue to fight to provide your best Internet option. Once again, thanks to all of our Ripton customers for your patience and your patronage.

Upstream Fiber Update

We have been assured that the FirstLight Fiber (DNS) issue has been mitigated. We have migrated most services that we can to a new set of FirstLight DNS resolvers. However, we are seeing some residual issues--some devices failed to migrate as they should have, and others with static IPs and DNS do not seem to be performing optimally on the old resolvers. We are addressing these issues on an individual basis.

Upstream Fiber Issue

We have been seeing some instability on our FirstLight upstream fiber feed, starting around 8:00pm this evening. The FirstLight NOC is aware of the issues and working to resolve them. Customers may be having difficulty reaching Internet destinations at the present time.

Ripton Power Mostly Up

As of late today, it appears that almost all of Ripton has grid power restored, although we are seeing a few stragglers apparently without power. We still have one minor AP at the Selden Mill location down without power. Other than that all nodes remain up and running.
(The Selden Mill location came back online with grid power early Monday evening).

Grid Power Still Mostly Down for Ripton

Most Ripton customers are still experiencing only sporadic connection to grid power. All NBN nodes are staying up on alternate power except the Leeds-Grip link into the village center area, where we still have limited backup battery reserve. We will be moving more robust battery/inverter capacity there from the school sometime in the next several weeks, as that capacity is no longer needed at the school.
Again, with the exception of customers in that limited area, and a single cutomer relayed through the Selden Mill Road repeater,customers with alternate power for their receiving units and routers should be able to connect.

We're Fine, but Power's Up, Down, Up, Down, UP....

RIPTON: Yesterday afternoon and last night's heavy snow caused widespread power outages with some periods of restoral, followed by outages again. It now appears that power was restored again to most of Ripton at about 11:55am. In any case, almost all Ripton customers with backup power have been able to stay connected as backup power at all of our major nodes performed as expected. Customers should remember that if they can keep their receiving units and routers powered with small battery backups they can stay connected through these power outages.
   The forecast calls for more heavy snow and mixed precipitation right through to the weekend, so we may see more of this....be prepared!

Ripton Link Weather Sensitivity Continues

We lost the W. Cornwall to Ripton link briefly (around 10 minutes, shortly before 6:00pm) again this evening and have recovered it and reconfigured it manually to a lower data rate in the interest of stability.  This link is obviously demonstrating some sensitivity to these marginal freezing temperature weather events.  We will be watching it closely and manually adjusting it until weather permits a total link replacement. Thanks for your patience during this time.