Services affected for Customers on Biondello Tower

Well, it has been an eventful two days. After losing power to our main site (mains power failure and back up generator failure) we managed to get all services restored again on Saturday morning.

All customers were affected during the outage – and we had a number of you that helped us out online making sure people were aware of the issues – so thank you to our customers during this period!

After restoring services and getting most of the power back online at Maurice and Calliope, we faced a new problem. The radio link between Biondello and Maurice suddenly started to become erratic and unstable.

We worked on this throughout Saturday, Saturday night and Sunday morning to try and restore the radio link. Unfortunately the only option we had was to reduce the capacity of the link so that we could achieve a stable connection. This meant that customers on Biondello could still access the internet – but the speeds would be impacted during peak times.

We know that this is a big issue, however we had been planning for a major radio upgrade in several locations, and this was one of the links scheduled for an upgrade – so we did order new equipment for this link.

However, there is still alot of work to do to get the radio link ready, organise tower climbers and then schedule an outage so that we can replace the radio link. The benefit of this however is that the link will be a MUCH higher capacity than currently and also allow us to plan for future radio upgrades in 2021 where we plan to get speeds of up to 250Mbps to customers. (Yes – you read that correctly – however this is not planned until late 2021).

We understand that this is very frustrating for those affected – but please rest assured we are working very hard at restoring and upgrading our core radio network at the moment … and we are REALLLLYYYY looking forward to 2021 (like everyone else ….)