September 19, 2020
On August 29th we posted the following: we have experienced a summer like no other in our 15 plus years of providing service to our local communities.
Weather wise: storms, lightening damage, tree growth have kept us running, as has the increasing demand for reliable internet with greater speeds and capacities.
This week was fraught with additional challenges as there was an incumbent’s fibre cut near Calgary whose back up system also failed resulting in a significant outage that impacted our service. On Friday, a core router failure was resolved by our upstream provider in the early afternoon; however, further up the line into the transit network bottlenecks and other issues were created impacting connectivity to the network that took some time for the engineers to resolve.
Our messaging system was quickly overwhelmed as every client was down. Our voice message system would not allow us to change the message or erase messages until the provisioning department of that company could reset the systems. At that time we were able to update our messaging on 780-669-1001; the issue was compounded as our commonly called phone lines are VOIP, hence, were not ringing. It was a learning moment and we sincerely apologize recognizing the disruption felt by our clients, in particular during these times, when internet has taken on a new meaning in navigating our work, educational and personal lives.
At this time we are unable to call back each client impacted but have started working on the development of an automated notification system. Please watch for further communications on this in the upcoming weeks as you will be required to opt in to receive notifications. We will also be reviewing other protocols to determine enhancements.
Lastly, we felt some explanation of the internet would assist in advancing the understanding of our comments on upstream providers. There is a saying that the internet is not made but created. In essence, it is nothing more than roads and interstates that connect networks together forming the “internet super highway” as illustrated by microtik above.
The internet is a conglomeration of millions of networks. Ours is considered a “last mile network”. We connect our clients wirelessly to an upstream provider who purchases bandwidth that is transported through the Supernet which is managed by another incumbent local exchange carrier (large telecommunications company) on a fibre network to a core vault. At the core vault, traffic is sent through various routes (generally fibre) to other networks that are similar and so on and so forth connecting the world to the web. As demonstrated this week, fibre cuts, router failures and issues up the line can have catastrophic consequences at our level. Generally, there is redundancy so things switch over quickly such as with the the fibre cut - service was directed to the back up line owned by another incumbent but failed; hence, the outage was not resolved seamlessly as one would expect.
We appreciate the patience and commitment of our clients. Service was restored yesterday evening. Powering down your router or restarting your computer if you are directly connected should resolve the issue. Should this not be effective, please send an email to support@canadasurfs.net with the subject - “service not restored” so we can review asap. Unfortunately, we are unable to call all clients back given the magnitude and duration of the outage. This event will serve to make us stronger - this is our commitment to you.
Sincerely, your team at Canadasurfs.