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broadband Engineer

When Things Go Wrong…

Broadband Network Operations Centre spots when a line goes down

I was in the broadband Network Operations Centre  the other day talking to the guys. We were looking at our instance of the Solar Winds network monitoring tool. Then I remembered I was on the way to see a customer later that day so I asked to see their network status.broadband

Blow me down if one of their sites wasn’t showing up as red – connectivity problem. I sauntered over to first line and to my delight one of the team was already looking at it. It was an ADSL connection. As we were watching the status reverted to green. ADSLs sometimes lose and reestablish connections on their own – that’s the vagaries of copper for you.

It’s nice when systems work like this. With ADSL we have a suite of tests we can run to see where the problem might lie. Sometimes the customer has unplugged the router for some reason. If we can’t find out the answer we spring into action depending on what we have agreed with the customer. Maybe it’s just a phone call asking him to switch the router back on. Maybe its a site visit.

Anyway I suspect that on this occasion the customer hadn’t even noticed there was a problem, but we did…

c ya