Connectivity issues

Today, at about 1am, I lost connectivity on my leased line. I know this, because I have a monitor that checks once per minute.

At 3am, Daisy noticed this problem. So they contacted Cable and Wireless, and got them to check the line. C&W said that the line is OK, so the geniuses at Daisy sent me an email to tell me that I've lost connectivity, and could I check the power supply.

Obviously, without connectivity, I didn't get the email.

So when I got up in the morning, there were thousands of messages from my monitor to tell me that I'd lost connectivity. I quickly narrowed it down to something outside my network, so I phoned Daisy to report it.

The person who took my call said that she'd pass it on the the Network Operations Centre, and that I could expect a response within two hours. The call center person didn't notice that there was already a fault report number outstanding (raised by Daisy at 3am). I guess their computer system doesn't do any kind of matching.

Two hours later, I called again. Nothing.

Two more hours later I called again, and this time, the call center put me through to the NOC. There I spoke to a guy who suggested I power-cycle (switch off and on again, a procedure that fixes computer problems more often than you might expect) the router (I should really have thought of trying that myself). I did that, and a minute or two later (it takes a little while for the router to wake up), connectivity was restored.

Well.

So I've asked that Daisy reconsider a procedure that calls for an email to be sent to someone who cannot receive emails. And then their procedure is to shelve the whole matter for twelve hours, before taking it up again. I don't know what they'd have done at that pount, but I kind of suspect they'd have just sent me another email. Which wouldn't have got to me either.

I can sort of understand that they wouldn't want to phone me at 3am. But I don't see why they couldn't have phoned me at 9am, or even a bit earlier.

I had a 14 hour outage. And all it needed was for the router to be power-cycled.

I'm committed to Daisy for a year or so longer, but unless they improve their quality of service, I'm not sure that I'll be renewing with them.