With the recent wild weather in South East Queensland, there have been a number of line faults. Here is another example of one where we got a better than expected outcome for the customer.
This was another case with a bank branch and we were told their NBN had gone off. NBN had been out to site and said the circuit was OK. They thought it was in the internal cabling. We regard that as a clue but not conclusive.
I headed up to the Sunshine Coast to have a look. The bank has a 3G/4G failover but when I arrived at site that was down too so the bank branch was closed since they had no connectivity although they did have phones. They are still on an old Aria 24ip. As it turns out that comes through an Integrated Access Device – DSL in and analogue out. That was working fine.
1st step was to see if the NBN was actually working. For simplicity I patched that out to a nearby desk socket which had power to plug in a test modem and laptop. In my experience DSL testers are OK but in some cases the circuit tests OK but won’t work on a modem. After a long time the circuit did synchronise and showed good speed, signal to noise and attenuation figures. This proved the internal cabling although I had already identified two possible tie pairs I might be able to use should the existing one be bad. These were from the old fax and ADSL lines. They still had battery but no dial tone indicating they were still connected to the telephone exchange. They sounded quiet or “clean” as we describe them.
Next question was why it wasn’t working on the bank router and why the 4G backup was down too? The Bank Network Operations Centre had to start a remote session through my laptop but couldn’t log into the router. A power cycle brought it back up and showed the myriad of operations testing memory, unpacking files, etc but then it started generating non-stop clocking alarms related to the WAN Interface Cards. The router was powered off and both cards removed. It came up OK so it was hut down again and just the 4G card inserted. That came up OK and set up the necessary tunnels. The NOC was then able to log in remotely but noticed it was laggy although it did improve. PC’s came up, security came up, etc but the TCR machine that dispenses the cash needed a reboot to pick up an IP address.
The VDSL WAN Interface Card had obviously been zapped through the line (FTTN delivery) and it had caused havoc with the router too. Overall a good result for the customer and another example of methodical testing to determine what is actually going on. If the 4G had been offline too then it would have been possible to put the test modem into bridge mode and plug it into one of the onboard network ports of the bank router. It is always good to have contingencies.
If you have unusual issues then please contact us. It may be relatively straightforward to rectify or in some cases a full report with figures and pictures may be what you need to go to the carrier and say “fix it”.
