f2s.gw1 temporary outage

[stephen_ex-f2s]

Currently F2S are experiencing a temporary outage on f2s.gw1. Users on this gateway will be unable to connect, BT are currently investigating the problem, and we hope to have normal service resume on this gateway shortly. We'd like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Update: Normal service has resumed for now on f2s.gw1. We're still monitoring the gateway closely for the time being, at least until BT elaborate on the reasons for outage. Again, apologies for the downtime to those affected.

[ianb]

I was well stuffed by this lengthy outage on Friday - my first in about 6-months of usage. I was down from 14:16 to 16:32. I feel that this length of time is unacceptable - and have mailed support twice asking for reassurance that an outage for this length of time will not reoccur. So far no reply. Any reassurance to be found here??

[brightwhitelight]

No-one can give you a reassurance like that, if you're that dependent on an internet connection you should probably have a think about what you can do to maintain your access throughout the outage (e.g. backup dialup connection, or secondary broadband connection). Even the best providers of any internet connection won't give you an SLA of over 99% uptime on a single connection - if this is the first outage you've experienced in 6 months then you've had 99.95% uptime which is really very good indeed.

[ianb]

Reassurance like what? Why can't all network critical faults be fixed or worked around in less than say one hour? Why can't netowrk critical faults be routed around or healed quickly. Why can't you give (via the phone) a status of outages?

I was down for over 2 hrs - and all you can say is tough! Well thanks.

[Matt]

Just like to remind you that we are not Freedom2Surf, but a group of users helping other users.

As for the delay in fixing, it depends on several things. The equipment that needed work could have been in a BT owned place etc, or even belong to BT. Getting things fixed at BT is not the quickest of things.

If you need your internet connection to be so reliable, I'd suggest you consider getting a leased line with a Service level agreement. ADSL is not designed to be a failsafe system, as you have discovered. Its also contended. This is why its so cheap.

[Justin]

Hi Ian,

I'd echo what the rest of my team members have said here. You can't expect to never have an outage whilst having a service thats based on a contended service, there's always going to be a small amount of downtime per year wherever you go, no-one can reall truly offer 100% uptime as there are so many things that can go wrong with an ADSL connection, from BT Problems, to exchange/line faults, and ISP problems.

Your uptime figures, of just 136 minutes of downtime in one incident in 6 calender months are very good figures, thats a very low amount of downtime, and I know a few users on other ISP's, including myself, that would love to have such reliability as that, but unfortunatley can't get it.

Freedom2Surf are generally very speedy in getting things fixed, and in this particular case it seems like the problem was related to BT's side, there is nothing Freedom2Surf can do if it's a BT Problem apart from inform them, the actual fixing is done by BT themselves, and it's down to them to carry out the work on Freedom2Surf's behalf.

If you require 100% uptime, the only way of doing that really is to have some backup solutions in place yourself such as a dialup account (F2S do provide you with one), a secondary broadband line, or as Matt said, get your own leased line, which I believe F2S deal in.

As for Freedom2Surf not letting you know about the faults, sure, they don't have a status line as such, just a general contact telephone number, but when there is an outage during office hours, Freedom2Surf do normally post here and over at ADSLGuide, and even if they don't post, a lot of the time myself and my team here will pick up on outages, and post information about them pretty soon after they start.

If you want to have information on outages direct to your inboxes, you would find it helpful to subscribe to our Mailing List which does exactly this, and aims to inform people about outages as soon as they occur.

Kind Regards,

[stephen_ex-f2s]

Originally posted by ianb@Oct 22 2003, 05:30 PM
Reassurance like what? Why can't all network critical faults be fixed or worked around in less than say one hour? Why can't netowrk critical faults be routed around or healed quickly.

Because all faults vary in severity and may or may not involve other parties whose equipment might fail?