A message from James

Wow, its April and Easter already, it’s been a frantic start to the year around here, seems like Almost Monthly Newsletters are turning into Nearly Yearly again. 
 
In preparation for all the new online streaming services coming along, we installed our first router in Sydney to get us better connectivity to the world, and this has allowed us to increase some of our traffic caps for fibre and copper customers. We are looking at options for wireless traffic caps also, but we need to finish upgrading the links to some of our bigger towers before we can do this, so it’s still a little while away, sorry.

If you plan to watch the rugby online in September, please try to move over to a fibre connection if fibre is available at your house, it really is the network of the future, and will offer the best chance of a hassle free experience. Installs can take a bit of time (outside our control), so please plan ahead if you can. We even have a promotion on fibre at the moment, which you can check out on our website here.
 
In late March we had our second longest outage / fault in the history of Inspire, with one of our really big Juniper routers (the thing that connects our main datacentre to the rest of the world) deciding it had done enough work for the day. Unfortunately the bigger the box, the bigger the fault, and even though this one was supposed to have all the protection available to stop it losing the plot, it did it anyway.
 
There were some pretty stressed staff, and customers, as we worked through the fault with the senior engineers from Juniper to understand what had happened and remedy it. I even heard some teenagers accidentally talked to their parents, but I imagine it was only asking when the internet was going to be working again.
 
Please accept my apologies if this impacted your day, we are currently looking at options for how to deal with this in a more elegant way in the future. We have several of these big boxes that should have been able to fail over between them for the majority of services if they had worked as planned.
 
On the rural broadband front, we have completed round one of our initial upgrade of our towers in the Tararua, as well as the majority of them in Palmerston North and Manawatu, and approximately half of our Whanganui upgrades. Our staff are now starting on upgrading our services in the Rangitikei district, starting from around Mangaweka back to Bulls over the next 6 months, keeping them closer to home for the shorter daylight hours.
 
This is a massive project, with over 500 towers to upgrade by 2022, and we are about 30% through it in the first year. Even though lots of us would love some rain, it would be good if it’s not too much before the end of May so we can finish the major backbone tower sites before winter proper arrives :)

A message from Paul, our General Manager

What a fantastic 3 days we had at the Central Districts Field Days this year!
The weather held out for us, and it was great to meet so many of our rural customers, whether brand new to Inspire Net, or having been with us since the start, we loved hearing so many stories from everyone.

We also ran a competition on our touch screen at our marquee, for a year of credit to a current customers broadband account, and our lucky winner enjoying that was Tim Spetch. Congrats Tim! 

We provided free internet at the food courts and for the Agri Challenge, plus a number of site holders used dedicated Inspire Net links to run their sites for internet and Eftpos, including the Field Days HQ and ticketing booths, as part of our sponsorship partnership again this year.

We were blown away by the amount of people that wanted to sign up, either being frustrated with their current provider, or just desperate to be able to connect to the Internet at all, but the biggest question.. watching sport over the internet! Which James has covered above. It really does show how much internet is and will be a huge part of our lives.

As you could imagine, we had a huge up take on our wireless services across the region and our team are busy working away at checking whether we can see your property and connect you, plus getting all the paperwork and equipment out to our subcontractors to install for you. The average time for this is generally between 4-6 weeks from time of application. We have moved across to a subcontractor model for installs and upgrades now because of the shear distance involved in travelling across the region, and we use 3 different contractors depending on regions as they have great local knowledge. If you have any feedback on our subcontractors please don’t hesitate to send this into us.

In other news, we recently had a large fault on our network which caused a huge amount of disruption to our customers, and while this was a 3^rd party piece of equipment and beyond our control, I would like to apologise for the disruption this caused our customers and thank our helpdesk staff who tried their best to deal with the huge number of calls that came in during that time, and our network operations team for working through the fault and getting it resolved. It sure was a long day for the team!.

Thanks! Paul.

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