Thu Aug 30 11:39:32 PDT 2001 — Update on BroadLink tower outage. Estimated time of repair is 3:00pm today. 100 BroadLink/Sonic.net customers are affected by this outage in the Southern Santa Rosa area.
On Monday morning, the licensed frequency 23 Ghz equipment serving the backhaul from the South SR tower failed. It was replaced with spare gear, which worked for a few hours, failed again Monday afternoon, then worked through Tuesday. It failed completely on Wednesday morning around midnight.
The vendor for this equipment is out of business, and BroadLink was unable to obtain technical assistance or any additional equipment beyond the spare that failed.
On Wednesday, BroadLink worked to bring up a 2.4 Ghz link (802.11b) to backhaul traffic from this tower site, but at around a 1.5 Mbps speed, this link was completely unable to handle the load requirements.
This AM, BroadLink has taken equipment out of service that was serving a link from their Dutton main office, and is moving it to downtown Santa Rosa to serve the backhaul for the South tower site. This 5 Ghz link has a max speed of 8 Mbps in this configuration, and will be adequate to support the traffic from the tower.
Technicians are currently on site in downtown Santa Rosa and at the tower site, and hope to have the equipment fully online by 3pm.
BroadLink asked me to pass along their apologies for the extended outage to the 100 affected customers. They’ve had an unforeseen situation where spare equipment failed after a brief time in service, and the vendor is no longer in business. (Co-incidence? Hmm..) The long term goal is to deploy backup connectivity to each tower site in this market to assure reliability in case of a link failure. -Dane, and from BroadLink, Chris, Shane, Randy and Tim.
Update: BroadLink has repaired their backhaul link, and has in fact made the network more efficient by removing one hop from the connection.