http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/radar/index_e.html?id=XTI
http://xkcd.com/831/
Monday, January 24, 2011
Friday, January 21, 2011
BlueberryNetworks Capacity and Equipment News
Belated Happy New Year to all BlueberryNetworks customers (and others who read this blog?) It has been an eventful two months since the end of November till the end of January.
Very late in November, BlueberryNetworks.ca added increased capacity at a new connection point to the internet. Ontera is still the primary carrier, but the connection goes directly down to Toronto, and "internet" is purchased there instead of from Ontera. Since this connection is at different location in Iroquois Falls, new hardware was obtained to connect to the tower sites in Val Gagne and Nellie Lake.
The increased capacity has been great - there have been many evenings when the average bandwidth used is over 30 Mb/s, and peaks of over 40 Mb/s. The new equipment (which has higher speed and greater capacity) has also been great.
Unfortunately, the reliability and robustness of the new system hasn't improved. How come?
There were four major outages of the service from Dec. 31, 2010 to Jan. 16, 2011. All of these were outages of the service that Ontera provides between Iroquois Falls and Toronto. BlueberryNetworks.ca has no control over these outages.
The next step in preventing them is for BlueberryNetworks.ca to have some diversity in who the providers are for the portion of the internet between Iroquois Falls and Toronto. That will be hard because of the limited number of carriers (ie two) that come into Iroquois Falls.
There still have been some BBN equipment failures, especially with the cold weather at the end of January, but these have affected only a portion of BlueberryNetworks.ca customers, not the whole network like the upstream carrier outages do.
Very late in November, BlueberryNetworks.ca added increased capacity at a new connection point to the internet. Ontera is still the primary carrier, but the connection goes directly down to Toronto, and "internet" is purchased there instead of from Ontera. Since this connection is at different location in Iroquois Falls, new hardware was obtained to connect to the tower sites in Val Gagne and Nellie Lake.
The increased capacity has been great - there have been many evenings when the average bandwidth used is over 30 Mb/s, and peaks of over 40 Mb/s. The new equipment (which has higher speed and greater capacity) has also been great.
Unfortunately, the reliability and robustness of the new system hasn't improved. How come?
There were four major outages of the service from Dec. 31, 2010 to Jan. 16, 2011. All of these were outages of the service that Ontera provides between Iroquois Falls and Toronto. BlueberryNetworks.ca has no control over these outages.
The next step in preventing them is for BlueberryNetworks.ca to have some diversity in who the providers are for the portion of the internet between Iroquois Falls and Toronto. That will be hard because of the limited number of carriers (ie two) that come into Iroquois Falls.
There still have been some BBN equipment failures, especially with the cold weather at the end of January, but these have affected only a portion of BlueberryNetworks.ca customers, not the whole network like the upstream carrier outages do.
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