O Canada! > Canadian > TekSavvy > Maintenance period -> No warning! Excessively Long!

reply to MaynardKrebs

Re: Maintenance period -> No warning! Excessively Long!

reply to bbarnett
The maintenance notice is a bit short noticed. If these were planned upgrades that were known for a while (which seems like the case) there should be 1 week notice.

In regards to OP, redundancy is the key. Keep a cellular network available or a cheap DSL connection. That ensures you get 99% connectivity. This is a residential service which is entitled to downtime. Not that it should be unreliable but there will be expected or unexpected downtime.

Get a T1.

reply to bbarnett
Here my 2 cents:
- I switched to Teksavvy close to a year ago and never had any issues with them. I get a good service with great price in the city I live in.
- If I was an "important" person and wanted to show others that, there are other means to do that. I don't need to come here and rant and put down a company that provides good service to many customers here and saves us money.
- A well informed person can suggest how to improve things that can benefit others instead of coming here and trying to rant and complain about service upgrade.

Teksavvy folks: You are great, keep up the good work. You are saving us money and providing good service. I do work from home many times and if once a year need be to go to office to do my job because of maintenance or network upgrade, I don't mind that.
You folks are great!

reply to bbarnett
There are several claims made by TSI Fanbois throughout this thread. Claims such as:

- You should not expect your ISP connection to be reliable

- Discussing "bad things" about Teksavvy should not be done in public, only with them directly

- Outright posts that have nothing to do with the topic, but can be boiled down to just "Don't feel bad Teksavvy, you're great!" fanboism

Ignoring the fanboisms, I've seen a few on-topic responses in this thread.

In those, absolutely no one claimed that this notice was provided with enough warning. Several statements, including ones by Teksavvy employees, agreed that the notice was short. As well, Teksavvy has indicated it made a mistake in said notice.

Leaving that agreed point aside, I did notice that Marc indicated there could be more data in the notice. However, neither Marc nor any other Teksavvy employee has provided that data on this maintenance period. There is still the question -- if Teksavvy has provided more info on maintenance in the past, and none for this, how severe will this several days of downtime be?

Marc, do not confuse the fanboism of this forum for a general customer response. Lack of data leads to lack of surety, and can only result in additional support costs for yourself.

I don't believe that it could hurt to provide more info in a notice, as long as it was prefaced with sufficient cautionary language. In fact, in a large maintenance period such as this, I believe more info would provide all upside, with no downside.

I'll leave this thread/topic to the fanbois noise, as I'm sure they will jump in after this response... thereby invalidating it as a means of on-topic discussion. I've made my point, time to move on...

reply to bbarnett
I'm not personally affected in as much of a negative way as the OP, but I absolutely do sympathize.

Teksavvy, we know we're not dealing with a business to business internet provider with "5 or more 9s" in their uptime, but this is no excuse to do things on such short notice. Like the op, I also think the maintenance periods are excessively long and notice is far too short.

With all due respect Teksavvy, planned outages are not emergencies and there is a bit of a problem with your corporate culture. I've put up with a lot of intermittent issues over the last 2 years, most of which are not entirely your fault. But there comes a time where enough is enough, at the end of the day we're all YOUR customers, so find a way to solve the issues. Go to work every day with the mindset of being the best internet provider, not with the mindset of "our customers love us, so we have a lot of slack we can use routinely".

I'm still a big Teksavvy fan, but not as much as I was 2 years ago. Over the long term, this is a problem.

Read what Gabe wrote above. "Maintenance window" does not mean "outage".

But Gabe & Marc, this is exactly why "maintenance window" should have been defined in the notice. People don't know what it is and many will incorrectly assume it means a 5-hour outage every night for 4 nights.

Won't harp on it any more as I'm trying to be helpful, not obnoxious. Best of luck with all the network upgrades!

OP: You're right about a couple things, but the key points being made here by the people you are now insulting are valid. No single residential connection is sufficient for someone who works from home. Many of us here, even those who don't work from home, have made the decision to have some redundancy. I would suggest you do the same.

reply to bbarnett
What if it wasn't a maintenance window? And the service unexpectedly went out at 10am monday morning after a truck took out your drop and ILEC takes 24 hours to fix it?
--
OptionsDSL Wireless Internet
»www.optionsdsl.ca

reply to bbarnett
The T1 idea is just silly and you still have a single point of failure (having an SLA doesn't mean he won't go down).

Best scenario would be dual technology (DSL & Cable) to two different providers.

reply to bbarnett
As this issue has clearly been discussed in every possible angle and aspect, I will keep this short but I would also like to put in my 2 cents.

Is the notice a bit on the short side? Yes, I believe so. Are these maintenance window(s) a bit on the long side considering the type of work being done? In my opinion, yes.

That being said, Teksavvy is a value-oriented ISP. Anybody who expects their Teksavvy level of service to be equal to or greater than the incumbents, well, have very high expectations! (putting it nicely...) For the cheap prices and the humongous b/w that they offer, I believe Teksavvy is delivering well. Not to mention their recent price slashes on all of their DSL services- I am extremely happy with that.

As far as I am concerned, I will survive. I am also an on-call engineer, and for that reason I have a Teksavvy DSL and Rogers Cable coming into my house. Worst comes to worse I can use my 3G connection and telecommute from that as well.

I think the message that I would like to convey to Teksavvy is that:

1) at the present moment, what you guys did are OK I guess. It will be tolerated.
2) moving forward, however, I would strongly recommend a better way to handle MW's. Other than giving more advanced notice for such a long MW, I am thinking that your routing capabilities should be redundant. During the night when overall IP traffic is light, you should roll-over your traffic to one box while you work on the other. Clearly I don't know how you guys have your routers set up but this would be ideal.

PS- well, that wasn't a short post at all! Apologies for the length. Keep up the good work and always strive for improvement!

reply to AkFubar

reply to reminiscence
Gang, thanks for all the advice. I think this is all a case of a poorly written notice.

You should read it more like "we're doing some maintenance next week, odds are that you will not see any downtime at all however we thought we would let you know"

We have redundant everything. On top of that we have double redundant everything since we're migrating from one redundant setup to another. We will definitely shift traffic from one to another to minimize downtime.

Past that we are adding another MX480 in order to completely segregate the border/transit routers away from the access routers. The result is that all the ATPIA links will have dedicated routers within the iBGP core mesh and each flow will have equal access to all the best routing paths. Right now depending where you land, given that transit and access are intermingled, the best path will generally prefer the transit that's directly connected. There's nothing wrong with that but we prefer to remove any artificial influence if one exists. Of course this is only a factor on the egress but we're spending the extra money to make sure we have the best setup possible. It also makes it all easier to maintain.

All of this is doable by shuffling things around with very little impact on anything. If anything, this is all cool stuff and it gives opportunity to talk about it. Otherwise, it's basically a non-event.

So anyway, for those more techie out there.. There you have it.
--
Marc - CEO/TekSavvy

reply to TSI Andre

reply to bbarnett

reply to Jeff Ott

reply to TSI Marc

Yep, pretty much.

reply to bbarnett

reply to bbarnett
Stating that TSI gave no warning is a complete over exaggeration, They notified us on the 5th, that is plenty of notice for residential lines. Especially since TSI isn't expecting everyone to loose Internet for the entire window, if at all.

If TSI was to ever decide they need to completely terminate all Internet to everyone for a large window main't, I'm sure we would have gotten a notice way ahead of time. And clearly stated it would be completely down for that time for everyone.

Marc has also said they have redundancies. TSI has a very knowledgeable network staff, and i am sure they will do everything possible to prevent any service loss from this maintenance.

But with any network main't even when redundant measures are in place some outage can always occur. Because of that they gave us a heads up that in those windows they will be preforming work on the network. Just in case something goes down for you.

I do agree that the notice gives the impression that all service would be down completely and could have been reworded. But it also doesn't explicitly state all connections will go down.

As in the word of Adam Douglas "Don't Panic!"

The last MX480 they worked on I didn't even notice any downtime all night, besides a silly loss connection to I believe the mail server.

As other have said if you need 100% up time for working from home, get a business grade SLA'd line. In fact get 2! nothing is 100% you have to plan for such. In fact most work from home employment contracts with 100% up time requirement state you must have a secondary redundant connection.

That said I've worked under a 100% network stability requirement before, so I understand.

I worked as a @home CSR for Rogers. And my employment contract required 100% up time while working. So I under stand your pains. I had a Roger cable connection, and lost my employment due to Rogers Cable constantly going down.. lol. Redundant connections on various networks is the only sure way to get 99.9999 up. I only had 1 point of connection and that was MY fault for cheeping out and not getting a redundancy.

Also if it was to be go down for 20 hours for some reason, 20 hours with in a year is still meeting a 99.7718 up time to you. Which is an excellent level of service for a residential customer.

So again, in the word of Adam Douglas "Don't Panic!"