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Many tens or hundreds of thousands of Xtra users were probably confused about why their favourite websites weren't loading or, at best, were loading intermittently.

Even if they'd managed to get through to Xtra's status message they'd have been none the wiser -- since as late as 9pm last night it was still saying "There are currently no known problems with the Xtra network" -- which was a blatant lie.

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But the problem was much wider than just Xtra, it also affected Telecom's VOIP services throughout Auckland.

However, even if you were using a good old-fashioned analog phone, a call to Xtra's help number was just as likely to produce an engaged signal as anything.

A call placed at 9pm did advise that there were problems affecting Xtra customers and that the wait time for a "real person (TM)" would be around 30 minutes.

Now we all know that shite happens and no provider, regardless of their pedigree or size is immune to the effects of faulty hardware, cable cuts, etc. What separates the men from the boys however, is how they handle such a crisis.

I'm afraid I'd have to score Telecom very poorly in this regard for a number of reasons.

Firstly -- the problem last night seemed to centre around a faulty or inaccessible DNS server. Those smart enough to alter their TCP/IP settings to use a non-Xtra DNS server suddenly found themselves back in business. Unfortunately only a very small percentage of the Net population has this much savvy.

So why wasn't the secondary server working -- or, if it was, why wasn't it on a sufficiently disparate subnet that it would remain unaffected by even a relatively severe comms outage?

Secondly -- (and this is a long-running bitch), why does Xtra bother having that ridiculous "Network Status" message when *every* time I've checked it during a major outage, it continues to claim there are "no known problems".

Is Xtra so stupid they don't realise there's a problem when their helpdesk lights up like a Christmas tree? Or is it just that they don't want anyone to know there's a problem so they try to hush it up?

Okay, so Telecom's lost a few billion dollars in market cap this month -- but hell, they're still a multi-billion dollar company, you'd think they could afford to hire someone who could take 30 seconds to update a dozen or so words on that webpage.

Thirdly -- are they actually doing any performance monitoring? I ask because I've been getting regular DNS lookup timeouts for some time and the latency on such lookups has been steadily getting worse over the past month or so. If this was an overloading issue, perhaps they might have seen it coming?

What this major outage *does* prove however, is just how dangerous it would have been to have allowed Telecom's DSL monopoly to continue.

Based on yesterday's (and previous) outages, it would seem that sometimes they couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery.

Fortunately, last nights problems only affected Xtra subscribers -- but what if it had been some other part of Telecom's network common to the UBS service?

We could have seen all broadband down like a dead dog, and no doubt those dial-up users who checked the status page would still be told "We see nothing wrong here".

At least, by unbundling the local loop, we're going to be removing yet another single point of failure that could knock out DSL.

So Telecom, how's the new broadband working for you?

From a customer's perspective, it's not cheaper, it's seldom faster and it certainly seems a whole lot less reliable. I wonder if those nice folks over at the Advertising Standards Authority (who think we're too young to watch a RAV4 ad) might step in and tell Telecom's ad bureau that lying in advertising is no more permitted than gratuitous violence. Somehow I doubt it :-(

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