Uecomm service woes continue - News - Communications

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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Uecomm service woes continue

By Andrew Colley, 0
May 08, 2003
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/Uecomm-service-woes-continue/0,130061791,120274310,00.htm

Uecomm customers are losing their patience after experiencing another serious outage on the carrier's network yesterday.

The outage was the second major disruption to strike Uecomm's fibre optic network in the past six days. Late last week, storms damaged parts of Uecomm's fibre optic network leaving some of the carrier's NSW customers without service for up to 24 hours. Uecomm yesterday confirmed it had experienced another service outage crippling its network between Melbourne and Sydney.

A spokesperson for Uecomm said the carrier was unable to provide a clear indication of how the outage had impacted its service delivery. She said two of its network switches had failed, leaving its customers unable to route data between Sydney and Melbourne.

The outage is bound to raise further questions over Uecomm's capacity to provide the service redundancy it had guaranteed to customers.

A Melbourne-based application service provision hosting company representative who spoke to ZDNet Australia said the incident compelled the company to seek a new network service provider.

The representative said the outage had left all of the carrier's clients and channel partners across the NSW eastern seaboard without service. Uecomm today disputed the claim. The carrier said the equipment failure severed its main link between Victoria and NSW isolating its network services in each state from each other but leaving services within each state intact.

The incident may have disrupted services offered by downstream Internet Service Providers that lease Uecomm's network capacity.

At 5.30 pm yesterday Uecomm was unable to indicate when the network service would be restored. The company today said service was restored at 3 am Thursday morning.