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Broadband Network Capacity (285660) - UPDATE
Network Capacity (ADSL/20CN)
Posted on: Friday 20 November 2009, 19:13
NB: This announcement was posted earlier this evening however one of the links contained in the update was wrong. This is the revised version containing the correct link.
This is an update to Wednesday's post about the ongoing speed and performance problems some of our customers are experiencing when the network is busy.
Over recent days our network engineers have been re-cabling parts of the network at one of our London data centres. This has made it easier to balance customer traffic across the platform, and has allowed us to perform some maintenance this afternoon on the problematic gateway pcl-ag02 - http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1258728887.htm
We have now finished this maintenance but no customers were disconnected. This means that we will no longer need to perform any network balancing ahead of the weekend.
As things are relatively well balanced already, we have taken the decision to return to a 'Plan A' operation - http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/quality_broadband/load.shtml
This should result in a noticeable improvement in speeds during the evening. We will remain operating under 'Plan A' over the weekend and will review the situation again on Monday when we will provide another update.
There is still the potential for your connection to become slower than normal when things get busy, however we have further maintenance work and fixes that are due to be rolled out over the coming weeks to address these issues.
Included in this work are plans to:
- Work with our vendors to develop and install a software patch to improve the stability of our edge routers (gateways).
- Upgrade the line cards on the edge routers to more modern versions.
- Change the 'virtual routing' of more customers to better balance traffic across our core network.
- Increase the capacity of the edge routers
- Upgrade our load balancers to reduce the potential for occasional DNS lookup failures
- Light more central capacity
On a related note we published a summary of the recent problems to our website earlier today that you can see here - http://www.plus.net/support/network_update.shtml
We would like to apologise again for the problems over recent weeks, and will provide another update on Monday.
Kind Regards,
Bob Pullen
Customer Support
This is an update to Wednesday's post about the ongoing speed and performance problems some of our customers are experiencing when the network is busy.
Over recent days our network engineers have been re-cabling parts of the network at one of our London data centres. This has made it easier to balance customer traffic across the platform, and has allowed us to perform some maintenance this afternoon on the problematic gateway pcl-ag02 - http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1258728887.htm
We have now finished this maintenance but no customers were disconnected. This means that we will no longer need to perform any network balancing ahead of the weekend.
As things are relatively well balanced already, we have taken the decision to return to a 'Plan A' operation - http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/quality_broadband/load.shtml
This should result in a noticeable improvement in speeds during the evening. We will remain operating under 'Plan A' over the weekend and will review the situation again on Monday when we will provide another update.
There is still the potential for your connection to become slower than normal when things get busy, however we have further maintenance work and fixes that are due to be rolled out over the coming weeks to address these issues.
Included in this work are plans to:
- Work with our vendors to develop and install a software patch to improve the stability of our edge routers (gateways).
- Upgrade the line cards on the edge routers to more modern versions.
- Change the 'virtual routing' of more customers to better balance traffic across our core network.
- Increase the capacity of the edge routers
- Upgrade our load balancers to reduce the potential for occasional DNS lookup failures
- Light more central capacity
On a related note we published a summary of the recent problems to our website earlier today that you can see here - http://www.plus.net/support/network_update.shtml
We would like to apologise again for the problems over recent weeks, and will provide another update on Monday.
Kind Regards,
Bob Pullen
Customer Support