Month: June 2011

ATM Customer Aggregation Router Reload

This Tuesday, June 28 at 12:01 AM, we will be performing a maintenance reload on our ATM customer aggregation routers. This will result in 5-10 minutes of downtime for Business-T and FRATM customers.

-Jared

DSL Aggregation Router Uplink Failure

Tonight, June 26 at 9:14 PM one of the uplinks to our DSL aggregation router that serves the Fresno area went down. We have replaced the failed link and all affected customers should be back online at this time.

-Jared

Customer Service Closed: 2pm-3pm 06/24/11

On Friday, June 24th, an additional half hour will be added to the weekly Customer Service Training Meeting (normally Fridays, 2pm-2:30pm). As a result, customer support via telephone will be unavailable from 2pm-3pm for this special one hour training seminar.

– Kim

 

Sonic Telecom Network Reachability Issues

We are currently investigating a problem within our telecom network. Customers on it may experience intermittent reachability to other hosts both in and outside of our network. We will provide an update shortly once we have further diagnosed the issue.

-Matt and the NOC

Update: Service should now be stabilized for any effected customers. We have determined there was a fiber cut in Palo Alto, CA that impacted a number of our backbone links. That in turn caused reachability issues while our network rerouted around the down circuits. Furthermore, a router bug prevented a number of prefixes from properly rerouting, thus causing additional impact to a limited number of Flexlink Ethernet and Flexlink Long Range customers in the North Bay. We are working with the hardware vendor to diagnose and resolve this issue. All in all, this was a very successful test of our redundancy scheme, which kept packets flowing despite a group outage impacting a significant number of circuits.

Customer Service Closing Early

Sonic.net Support and Sales will close at 9:00pm Friday June 17th for our employee movie night. Support and Sales will open at the regular time Saturday morning.

– Jasper C. and the Sonic.net Staff.

Non-Intrusive CLEC Hardware Maintenance

This Thurday, June 16 from 12:01 AM to 3:00 AM, we will be inserting new cards into the backbone routers for our CLEC network to add capacity. This work should not cause any impact to customers, but if something goes awry, impact should be minimized to about 60 seconds of Internet connectivity loss and the possibility of a lost phone call.

-Jared and Matt

Update: All hardware maintenance has been completed with no impact to customers.

NOC Hotline Outage

The network operations hotline for business support is currently experiencing an outage. We are working with the phone provider to restore service as fast as possible, but there is no ETR at this time. If you presently need to contact the NOC, please call the main Sonic 707-522-1000 number and request to be transferred.

-Matt and the NOC

Update: Service has been restored for this number and the NOC may again be reached normally.

A storm of press

We’ve seen a big up-tick in traffic here due to the coverage of our Fiber deployments. In the last few days, the Press Democrat, Ars Technica, ZDNet, MaximumPC and Engadget have all written about Sonic.net. Check out the coverage:

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20110607/ARTICLES/110609527?p=all&tc=pgall

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/06/1gbps-fiber-for-70in-america-yup.ars

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/sonicnet-launching-1gbps-fiber-to-home-internet-for-70-per-month/50441

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/1gbps_internet_access_70_america_sonic_says_yes

http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/13/sonic-net-starts-trial-of-1gbps-fiber-to-the-home-internet-in-ca/

Don’t worry though – we’ve got plenty of capacity to handle an influx of Fusion subscribers, and web and provisioning traffic loads are not a problem. If you want Fusion, sign up now, and help us build the momentum toward Fiber.

 

LATA1 Legacy DSL Outage

At approximately 9:15 am this morning an OC12  serving a roughly a quarter of our legacy DSL connections in the Bay Area went down. Our Network Operations Center responded to the problem quickly but the outage cleared on it’s own within 7 minutes.  We have a ticket open with our vendor to determine the root cause.

-Chris

ATM Switch Maintenance

Tonight, June 8 at 12:01 AM we will be performing hardware maintenance on one of our ATM switches in San Francisco. This ATM switch serves DSL in the Bay Area and has been experiencing hardware problems recently. The maintenance will involve replacing the suspected problem cards in the chassis to restore normal service. Expected downtime is 5-10 minutes.

-Jared

Update: The hardware replacement has been completed and all affected customers are back online.