NewNet LLU customers in Reading/Bracknell/Basingstoke areas may currently be suffering a loss of broadband service.  NewNet engineers are investigating to restore service as quickly as possible.

Date: Tuesday 9th March 00.01 – 04.00
Description: Maintenance to core network
Risk assessment: Loss of service to colocation and leased line customers

NewNet engineers will be carrying out essential maintenance on routers within the core network to upgrade the network for future expansion to fully enable IPv6 across all customer access routers. During this maintenance period engineers will be fully enabling IPv6 support across the whole customer access layer due to increased requests for IPv6 from customers.

Customers will see a loss of service for possibly up to 30 minutes while access routers are reconfigured. Services should be classed at risk for the whole maintenance period.

The following information has been received from Openreach for ADSL Services.

Following heavy snow falls and freezing temperatures in parts of Scotland OpenReach is now declaring a matter beyond our reasonable control (MBORC)/force major event.

The declaration is effective from 08.00 today 3rd March 2010 and only applies where delays to provision and repair activities have been caused by the severe weather conditions in affected parts of Scotland.

The recent heavy snowfalls and freezing conditions in parts of Scotland over the last week have impacted OpenReach by causing the reduced mobility of our engineering workforce particularly in remote areas.

This has resulted in a number of missed jobs and appointments. Whilst every effort has been made to contact those end users affected, we have not always been successful. We have carefully assessed the situation over the last few days and feel that we now have to declare MBORC due to the continuing severe conditions in the following regions:

• North East Scotland
• Tayside and Fife
• South East Scotland
• West Central Scotland

It should be stressed that it only applies to specific provision and repair activities delayed or prevented by the snow and freezing conditions.

There will be scheduled maintenance for our Hosted Exchange services between 06:00 to 10:00 on Saturday 6th March. During this time, there will be intermittent access to all Hosted Exchange services.

We would like to apologise in advance for any inconvenience this may cause.

The NewNet Helpdesk opening times will change from their current arrangement of 6am - 10pm to the new hours of 8am - 8pm Monday to Friday, effective from 1st March 2010.  The Saturday Helpdesk hours of 9am - 5m will remain unchanged.  The 24 hour priority phone line for high end services such as leased lines and colocation will also remain unchanged.

After careful analysis and consideration, we have identified that our weekday Helpdesk hours are busiest between 8am and 8pm and we would like to focus on providing the optimum level of service during this time so that all customer queries are dealt with immediately.  As part of this focus, our Helpdesk team is set to expand and we are currently recruiting extra Helpdesk staff to increase customer service response times during these core hours.   Our specific focus on this time bracket will mean that each customer should see an increase in the overall customer experience during the time period that matters to them most.