topic Re: 21CN - How do Plusnet customers know if there is an outage in their exchange? in Plusnet Feedback

21CN - How do Plusnet customers know if there is an outage in their exchange?

AndyH — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 09:57:01 GMT

Quick and simple question: If there is an outage in an area or exchange affecting 21CN customers, where do Plusnet publish this information for customers to see?
Other ISPs - BT Retail/TalkTalk/Sky/Zen/AAISP etc. have this information on their service status pages.
This page http://usertools.plus.net/exchanges/mso.php relates to only 20CN - so it's of no use to the majority of Plusnet's customers.

Re: 21CN - How do Plusnet customers know if there is an outage in their exchange?

jelv — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 10:05:05 GMT

Are you sure that that refers to 20CN only? I thought it was only the VP information (which has recently been removed) was 20CN only.

Re: 21CN - How do Plusnet customers know if there is an outage in their exchange?

AndyH — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 10:17:17 GMT

I'm 90% sure.
Take for example Wrexham. There has been an on-going issue here for some time.
BT Retail have the following service status:

Quote
Tue 13/01/2015 at 07:47 Ongoing BT Broadband problem in the Wrexham area
Dialling codes affected: 01978
Estimated time to resolve: 12:03
Dialling codes affected: 01978
Impacting service since 05/01/2015 15:19
Update 3: Due to the complexity of this incident, a specialist engineer is required and this is delaying the resolution of the fault.
Update 2: The issue remains ongoing however, full focus remains on restoration
Update 1: Investigations are continuing in to the cause of this outage.
We're really sorry but we've got a problem at the moment in the Wrexham area, which means that some of our customers will be having trouble getting online. We're trying to fix the problem as quickly as we can.
Please revisit this page for further updates.

Plusnet have now (finally) added it to this page - http://community.plus.net/exchange-information/
90% of customers in the South Wales area is quite a lot of customers I would imagine. But where is this published for Plusnet customers to see? It's not on the Usertools site and it's not on Plusnet's service status page.
Carl has been waiting patiently for some time for an update - http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,134900.0.html What about customers that do not know about the Exchange Information site and those who've not seen Carl's thread?
Edit: What about phone service outages? Where can customers find details about that?

Re: 21CN - How do Plusnet customers know if there is an outage in their exchange?

Oldjim — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 10:23:03 GMT

Pardon my confusion
Where does it refer to the Wrexham outage on that page
Referring to the 90% of customers - that isn't a loss of service just a major contention problem
Just to add - that BT outage isn't reported on Zen either so is it BT specific

Re: 21CN - How do Plusnet customers know if there is an outage in their exchange?

AndyH — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 10:27:56 GMT

I think the BT Retail page is badly worded as it relates to this - http://status.zen.co.uk/broadband/fault-outage-details.aspx?reference=401
It's not an outage issue but a capacity one.
Edit: It is on the Zen page, but there is a bit of a flaw that once something passes an anticipated clear date, it falls off the Current Issues page unless it's updated.
Here is the thread on the BT Infinity page - https://community.bt.com/t5/BT-Infinity-Speed-Connection/BT-Infinity-issues-again/td-p/1430104

Re: 21CN - How do Plusnet customers know if there is an outage in their exchange?

MattyC — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 11:14:22 GMT

We don't have the facility for automated posting of service statuses. Which means we have to update them ourselves whenever there are problems with an exchange.
Because of this, we generally endeavour to post the outages likely to have more of a significant effect on our customers.

Quote from: AndyH
I'm 90% sure.

I've checked the first few pages. Pretty sure this is correct.

Re: 21CN - How do Plusnet customers know if there is an outage in their exchange?

spraxyt — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 13:25:33 GMT

As far as I'm aware the MSO reports in the Exchange Checker should cover both 20CN and 21CN outages. The information comes from BTW emails sent to the Exchange Checker listener. Only messages reported as MSOs are collected, others are dropped. The South Wales issue seems to be capacity related rather than an MSO.

Re: 21CN - How do Plusnet customers know if there is an outage in their exchange?

AndyH — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 14:01:43 GMT

@ spraxyt - Can you check the inbox of the exchange checker to see if any emails have the subject 21CN WBC/NGA/FTTC? That list looks solely 20CN to me.

Re: 21CN - How do Plusnet customers know if there is an outage in their exchange?

spraxyt — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 16:48:17 GMT

Thanks, will do. I'm going through the code to check what is picked up. Recording of new incidents seems not to be happening at the moment though updates to existing ones are being added to the detail.

Re: 21CN - How do Plusnet customers know if there is an outage in their exchange?

spraxyt — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 19:24:01 GMT

I fixed the problem causing new reports not to be added last night. Recording seems OK now.
I've checked back through mails-received logs and there is no mention of 21CN, WBC or FTTC. So you are right, the reports are 20CN only.

Re: 21CN - How do Plusnet customers know if there is an outage in their exchange?

AndyH — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 19:28:46 GMT

Thanks for the update.
Do you have the ability to subscribe to the 21CN updates? It should just require an email.
It would be useful though if Plusnet could build something like this - http://status.zen.co.uk/broadband Plusnet customers should not have to rely on information sources from other ISPs.

Re: 21CN - How do Plusnet customers know if there is an outage in their exchange?

chrcoluk — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 21:01:08 GMT

yeah, it probably take a day or so to code something to grab data from BT's API and put on a website. I can only assume its something plusnet want to withold.

Re: 21CN - How do Plusnet customers know if there is an outage in their exchange?

spraxyt — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 23:48:39 GMT

I think 21CN status information is restricted to staff only.

Re: 21CN - How do Plusnet customers know if there is an outage in their exchange?

AndyH — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 09:13:08 GMT

Ok - it would be good to get some staff input here.
I am assuming that quite a large percentage of Plusnet customers are on 21CN and I do not think it's acceptable for there to be no Service Status page where they can check if there is an issue/outage/fault/PEW for their exchange and area.
I appreciate what Matty said about not having the ability to automatically post statuses at the moment, but this should be something that is important and should be changed. The only statuses I can recall seeing manually inputted were more about MBORCs from Openreach.

Re: 21CN - How do Plusnet customers know if there is an outage in their exchange?

MattyC — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 09:29:07 GMT

I'll give it a mention to see if we can add any further resource/priority to the issue.

Re: 21CN - How do Plusnet customers know if there is an outage in their exchange?

Anotherone — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 09:22:04 GMT

Well I'm confused by several comments in this thread - the Title clearly refers to Outage, yet a number of links refer to Congestion - two different things.
Congestion seems to be covered here - http://community.plus.net/exchange-information/
MSO's appear to be covered here - http://usertools.plus.net/exchanges/mso.php ; but a casual look at a selection of those (at time of posting) suggests that they are 20CN only (an aspect mentioned above).
Yet when looking at some individual exchange detail (at time of posting) eg. Dronfield that appears to be 21CN information - also doesn't seem to be on the MSO page. (maybe because the list is only showing 20 incidents - can't we have a "more" clickable link to go back further)
But also looking at another individual exchange eg. Norwich City there is nothing showing, yet it has been the subject of an Outage according to the Zen list.
I certainly recall seeing references in the past to MSANs on some individual exchange outages (obviously 21CN?) but must admit I haven't used the checker that much in recent times due to the lack of updates and tend only to look when there is a more significant outage.
Anyway, I'm finding the current situation totally confusing, and the thrust of AndyH's post is that Plusnet Users to not have a reliable place to go to find this information. This has been the case for sometime and with the number of customers that Plusnet has and the high profile advertising that it employs, this really isn't good enough.

Re: 21CN - How do Plusnet customers know if there is an outage in their exchange?

AndyH — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 09:33:36 GMT

When there is a severely degraded performance in an area, BTW will sometimes send it as a fault/outage notification.
Norwich City refers to 21CN congestion that has been on-going for some time. This is due to be fixed this morning as new fibre links were planned to be activated/users moved overnight.
Dronfield is 20CN (it affects 20CN-BRAS-ESR5-SHEFFIELD3).

Re: 21CN - How do Plusnet customers know if there is an outage in their exchange?

Anotherone — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 10:23:47 GMT

Well that just confuses things even more, whilst I should have perhaps used another example for an outage eg. Portsmouth North here's the Zen detail, there were planned outages for the fix of the congestion issue affecting Norwich 01603 that was the most recent.

Quote
There will be one service outage to End-Users of approximately 120 minutes. The work will take place within the period 00:01 - 06:00.

So not quite a straight forward as your response suggests.
Dronfield is a 21CN Market 3/B exchange as listed by SamKnows and the Exchange Status checker and according to the Zen report that clearly affects 21CN as well and there's nothing here that suggests it's 20CN only (quite the contrary)
......but in any event who cares. If tried (perhaps not too successfully) to give examples of -
1) How confusing the information is (as well as some points in this thread)
2) How there does appear to be some 21CN information in some places but not in others
3) How there clearly appeared to be 21CN outage information for individual exchanges some time ago
4) How the current situation just isn't good enough
Your last rather negative sounding reply has just undermined my post in the way you have phrased it.
You are either happy with the current level of information and the way it's presented, or you are Not!

Re: 21CN - How do Plusnet customers know if there is an outage in their exchange?

AndyH — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 10:53:29 GMT

I'm a little confused as the 'Norwich' link you posted has nothing to do with Norwich City.
The two Dronfield issues don't seem to be related at first hand - the different dates/and the fact that the 20CN notice is for the 20CN BRAS in Sheffield. The Plusnet notification is definitely 20CN though and not 21CN.
I'm not sure where I've said I'm happy with the current level of information? I think it's clear that I'm not, no?

Re: 21CN - How do Plusnet customers know if there is an outage in their exchange?

MauriceC — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 11:23:13 GMT

Just to add my 2p to the ongoing debate.
I believe it true to say that all tech savvy Forum users; The Usergroup and Plusnet technical staff are unhappy at the current status of Service Information availability. The question is "How can we best resolve it?"
Plusnet has access to the core data ex BT, but is currently resource bound in so many other critical areas that there seems little optimism that any resource will be available in the near future.
Over many years, the Usergroup has developed and maintained a number of useful utilities with good co-operation and in collaboration with Plusnet. But times and Data Protection / security limitations are now a major hurdle in getting timely access to the base data to progress any new development. Our resources are are also finite (and dwindling) but there are a number of interesting challenges in making the available 'snapshots' into a valuable 'look up' resource for all to use?
I hope that we can clear the channels and make some progress.
Maurice