24th April 2006, 06:23 pm
I think I need to create a new blog category specifically for my experiences with BorderNET. Now, I’m under no delusion that BorderNET’s customer support is any better or worse than other ISP service desk, but…
Last week, after experiencing several overnight outages I called their support desk phone number. After hanging on for a while it timed out and a recorded message asked me to email my query instead. So I duly sent in my email. Today, being some days later, I received an email which didn’t respond to my query but said that they had a heavy load of emails to reply to, and could I phone their support desk if my original query was urgent.
Does anybody else see the problem with their circular logic?
21st April 2006, 09:22 pm
I gave my recipe for oatmeal porridge some months ago. I just thought I’d mention that once the 50 grams of oatmeal plus 250 grams of water have been cooked, I’m left with 180 grams of porridge in the pan. These days it’s served with 12 grams of wheat bran, 22 grams of oatmeal bran, 100 grams of fruit, and 100 grams of made-at-home yogurt.
2nd April 2006, 07:24 pm
I’d noticed that the network link between home and the world had died at around 1pm (localtime) for the past few days. Then yesterday, Saturday, I happened to glance at the Gilat SkyEdge IP satellite modem at a telling time. The signal level was way down. The first thing that crossed my mind was that the strong wind blowing at the time had nudged the satellite dish a little. Then, just as I was musing over the problem, the signal strength started to rise, slowly and steadily. A few seconds later I realised that, given the time of day (midday if you ignore daylight savings), the sun would be behind the Optus satellite used by BorderNET.
A quick trip to Google confirmed that March and September (equinox time) were the times of the year that sun transit outages occur.
Today, I manually recorded signal strength (in dB) against time. Here’s the graph showing the results.
(click to enlarge)
It clearly shows that the carrier to noise ratio drops enough to make the signal useless for several minutes.
Sadly, from a customer service perspective and as best I can determine, BorderNET didn’t notify customers of such outages. I mentioned my lunchtime network loss to a BorderNET service desk operator on Saturday - he didn’t mention the possibility of sun transit outages. Neither is there a message on the BorderNET bulletin-board which expressly states that its purpose is to notify users of outages.
Anyway, it was interesting to experience this phenomenon firsthand.
