Big Link Wobbles

We have been noticing a gradual drop in traffic volume from the Ripton area lately. It turns out the microwave link quality from W. Cornwall to the Hanson tower had been deteriorating. We were able to adjust power and modulation on that link this morning and quality is significantly improved, but we have accelerated a plan for replacement of the entire link with new, higher capacity equipment. Stay tuned for details.

Emergency Maintenance

We were forced to take down our edge routers for emergency reprovisioning shortly after Midnight this morning, causing a lack of access for all users. Work continued for the next several hours but service was fully restored well before dawn. We apologize for the lack of warning.

Packet drops

We have become aware of a small and variable amount of packet loss recently. The problem appears to be on the ethernet side at Oxford of the Bicentennial to Oxford link and appears to be on the tower. We are monitoring the situation.

LIGHTNING OUTAGE REPORT

This was a big one. Tuesday evening's violent thunderstorms included a direct strike on the W. Cornwall tower and significant damage to radios atop Bicentennial Hall. We were able to restore service through the night into Wednesday morning, but damaged gear in both locations failed again making diagnosis and repair even more problematic, and it was well into last evening before service was fully restored.

This season's expansion plans include redundant ring structure for our backbone radios which will make the possibility of this kind of outage nearly impossible. We continue to work to make NBN your best option for broadband service. Thanks for your patronage.

PLEASE REMEMBER TO CALL 382-8700 FOR CURRENT NETWORK STATUS  IF YOU ARE EXPERIENCING PROBLEMS!

Fiber Outage

One of our two fiber providers had a widespread outage--"most of Vermont"--between approximately 9:10 and 10:08am this morning. We were unable to shift all of our users over to our other provider by the time of restoral, so some users would probably have suffered almost nearly an hour without service. We are in the process of configuring the network so that all customers will automatically and nearly seamlessly move to the remaining upstream provider before this kind of rare event is likely to recur.

"Sweaty Backhaul" Revisited

We blew it--we missed the diagnosis. The instability issue in the Tuesday post persisted, intermittently, for the next two days. The problem turned out to be a faulty router power supply that was dropping power output level intermittently, which caused very confusing routing and authentication issues that appeared variously to be configuration problems, radio interference, or ethernet connectivity issues. We eventually solved the problem with a replacement of the power supply late Thursday afternoon.
Our New Years Resolution and promise to all: We are redesigning for all-DC power distribution and monitoring for all power parameters at major nodes, with automated alarm thresholds., to be instituted completely in 2014.

Sweaty Backhaul

Yesterday's severe temperature and humidity swing caused a major link from the W. Cornwall tower to the Ripton tower to become unstable, causing most Ripton customers to experience a "choppy" connection. The problem grew worse over the course of the day, and it was 1:30am this morning before we were finally able to stabilize it. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused, and thank you for your patience.