As some may have noticed, this blog has been up and down like a yo-yo for the last two weeks.

The issues are caused by the fact that I host it off the home office connection - which by and large has been solid as a rock for the last 2 years, considering the amount of traffic the site gets is fairly minimal.

I opted to be one of the first guinea pigs to try the LLU (Local Loop Unbundled) offering from Orcon on the home office - alas it has not been a pain-free experience.  I think google analytics tells the story best:



The connection got switched to LLU on around the 21st / 22nd of September - at which point my connection became a bit erratic - then it started working well enough - before going wonky again, and then completely falling over altogether on the following Saturday - at that point there was no sync.

Around Wednesday sync was restored, then Auth as well on thursday (so 5 days without any access) - the connection was looking ok at that point, but then a day or so later I started noticing that it was disconnecting every 5 to 10 minutes, then taking another 20 or so seconds to re-establish the connection, that's still happening as we speak - though they helpdesk has now raised the priority of the ticket to urgent in the hope that it might be resolved soon.

So far I've been a pretty disappointed with the alacrity of Orcons resolution process and the lack of direct contact that can be made with the LLU team.  Normally with Orcon issues get logged with the help desk, a ticket is raised, and after a couple of days you end up dealing directly with corporate support (i.e. people who know what's wrong) - this process works well, and seems to filter out those people who actually have problems related to their own hardware or lack of knowledge.

Not so with LLU, you raise a ticket, but the LLU team can't be contacted directly, and as happened with me - I had no connectivity for 5 days, and also nothing done about the issue, it just sat in the queue - and the helpdesk did not seem to know any more about the issue then I did - I end up feeling bad having to pester the helpdesk every day to find out the progress on the issue - and they keep feeding me the same line of "the LLU tech will call you once the issue has started being worked on / resolved, I'm sure they'll do a card reset 1am tomorrow" - So far nobody from Orcon has ever called me (and I'm not actually sure they ever did do a card reset, but I suspect that's probably not the issue either).

Now I'm not blogging this out of Venom - I mean all said 'n done I am guinea pigging the service to some extent and I know if I'd just stuck with my previous telecom/Orcon mix none of this would have happened - and the @Orcon folks on twitter have offered to help push the ticket through quicker which was nice (incidentally ISP available on twitter == good) - but still I just hope the issue resolution process becomes a little more robust, and I thought this might be interesting to anyone else out there considering jumping on the LLU band wagon.

So my peeves so far are:

1. Orcon don't actually seem to be doing any follow-up - I had to do all the calling (and sitting in the queue) incidentally, 3pm is the perfect time to call their helpdesk, it's never busy.
   
2. The LLU team can't be contacted - that bugs me - pestering the help desk is counter-productive for days on end, when the issue is sitting with the LLU team.  Being able to check the ticket status (with notes etc.) on-line would be have been nice as well (and saved some phone calls).
   
3. The helpdesk doesn't seem to even know when the LLU team will look at an issue.  I got the distinct feeling the help desk guys knew as little as I did.
   
4. No weekend support - I lost connectivity early Saturday, but the LLU team doesn't work on the weekend (or so the helpdesk told me) - this sucks - telecom have engineers working weekends, especially as Orcon are responsible for phone issues as well, I could end up with no internet or voice for an entire weekend - something I've always found Telecom very quick to respond to.  I would hope this only applies to home customers!
   

Hopefully these (and the technical issues I'm having) are all just teething problems and will go away as the LLU roll out continues - in the mean time forgive this blog for being partially unavailable, and my apathy in not bothering to move the site to dedicated hosting (which I do plan to do sometime this year, probably along with a change in blogging software - but I'm too busy with other things at the moment).