My sister’s Internet connection isn’t working, and she called me up to troubleshoot it. The router’s testing indicated that it was a line issue, so I headed over to Telecom’s service status page to see if this was a known problem.
The entire telecom.co.nz site (NZ’s biggest Telco) is down for 6 weekend daytime hours for maintenance! These guys must think it’s still the 1990s or something (like Vodafone a while back).
In the first place, why are they doing maintenance during the day? Maintenance that needs downtime is done in the middle of the night when the impact on customers will be least (people building roads have known this for decades).
Secondly, it takes very little work to setup a system where you can serve at least something (static pages, if nothing else) via an alternate location. Replicating the entire setup (account maintenance etc) is probably overkill, but there is absolutely no reason not to have some content available. Certainly the status page would be one of those things (it could be manually updated if necessary – I doubt you could find a NOC staff member that can’t write HTML). I would think that things like pricing and packages would be another (that content is probably dynamic, but anything that doesn’t require a login should be easily copied and served elsewhere temporarily).
NZ’s ISPs are pretty laughable in many respects.
TonyAndrewMeyer 