Jersey Telecoms - Quality & Reliability of Internet Services

Below is an article posted to the Usenet group uk.local.channel-isles regarding issues with Jersey Telecoms' Internet services.

From: Matthew Richardson 
Newsgroups: uk.local.channel-isles
Subject: Jersey Telecoms - Quality & Reliability of Internet Services
Date: Sun, 01 Apr 2001 21:58:23 +0100
Organization: I. T. Consultancy Limited, Jersey
Message-ID: <1g5fct86btbbq10e78p0h1oqoa03r0h77p@news.itconsult.net>

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A number of people have asked me for my comments regarding recent 
problems with Internet connectivity via Jersey Telecoms.  The purpose 
of this article is to provide such comments, both from my perspective 
as a consultant in this field, as well as that of a customer of these 
services.

To put this in context the quality of Jersey Telecoms' Internet 
connectivity has seemed below standard for a number of weeks and 
included an extended outage on Thursday 22 March.  As a result of 
this outage I invited myself to a meeting with Jersey Telecoms' 
representatives on Friday 23 March.

The particular outage resulted from a total failure of their main 
provided UUNET coupled with a failure at France Telecom who were not 
advertising routes to JT.  The result was that, although the France 
Telecom link was up, the rest of the Internet did not know.  Thus 
total disconnection ensued for around 4.5 hours.  Thereafter when the 
French link was working, the performance of the connectivity was 
appalling.  Things got back to normal the next day.

It was this failure which resulted in Jason Thompson of Softek being 
quoted in the JEP of Friday 23 March describing this as being "a 
disgrace".

The meeting was attended by Ted Hefford, the Head of Network in the 
Network Operations Division (under whose responsibility Internet 
connectivity falls) together with one of his engineering colleagues.  
Also present were Andy Le Gresley and Steve Falle.

I started by noting that Jersey Telecoms claimed that their Internet 
Backbone Service (IBS) was very resilient, and in particular it was 
claimed to be "highly resilient in the event of an upstream provider 
failure".  It is also claimed that "upstream bandwidth is maintained 
to always provide sufficient capacity for the total network peak 
demand".

The previous day's events had clearly led me to the view that these 
claims of resilience were currently inaccurate and that, furthermore, 
were any client to ask me whether the JT IBS service was sufficiently 
resilient to meet their business needs, I would have to reply "no".

Whilst two simultaneous failures are unfortunate, the performance of 
the system over the previous night clearly showed that the bandwidth 
on the link via France was inadequate to support the service in the 
event of a UUNET failure.  The published link capacities of 45MBit to 
UUNET and 4 MBit to France Telecom would certainly lend support to 
this possibility.

JT explained that they had a 45MBit circuit to France Telecom on 
order, but that this could not be installed until a radio link 
upgrade to France.  Installation was reasonably anticipated to be of 
the order of three months away.  My view was that it would be wholly 
unacceptable to continue for upto three months where the French link 
was unable to carry the full bandwidth utilisation at all times.  As 
a result, JT are currently installing additional bandwidth to France 
Telecom to cover the shortfall, although I do not know when it will 
become live.

It was clear to me that JT were not happy with the current situation 
and were keen to remedy matters.

JT also reported that, following yesterday's failures, they had put 
in place local monitoring which would quickly identify any future 
faults caused by lack of route advertising by either of their 
upstream providers.

The quality of the UUNET service was discussed at length as this was 
felt to be a major contributory factor to the poor quality of their 
feeds over the preceding weeks.  JT were going to have some very 
serious discussions with UUNET and would consider replacing them as a 
provider should it prove necessary.  It is worth noting that a number 
of the issues preceding that failure also affected Newtel who also 
connect via UUNET.  However this particular failure affected JT 
alone.

One of my particular concerns was that both JT's DNS servers (the 
gadgets which translate names they host into physical addresses) were 
located within the same network and were both inaccessible during the 
previous day's failure.  I robustly expressed the view that I 
considered this inadequate and felt that they should have one or more 
secondary DNS servers within a different Autonomous System (in very 
rough, and technically inaccurate, terms the "unit" by which Internet 
routing is distributed).  I would feel the same for email services, 
except that I was advised that, apart from jerseymail.co.uk and old 
Cinergy services, JT provided no email hosting or backup.  This seems 
curious given that ITSoffshore claim to provide email SMTP relay and 
backup services.  Happily my own systems provided for DNS & email 
servers in separate Autonomous Systems and so I, and users of my 
systems, continued to enjoy email during this outage.

As an aside, I would mention now that jerseymail.co.uk looks far too 
unresilient to me to be used for any serious business application.

There has also been a recurring issue with one of their core routers 
(to which both UUNET and my own systems connect) where it 
periodically gets sufficiently confused to send certain traffic off 
in the wrong direction.  This was, I felt, a reasonably severe 
problem as it could only be overcome with manual intervention from 
their engineers.  It was also particularly difficult to detect by 
automated monitoring as the symptoms were not always the same.

It was reported that this was being worked on and that their 
consultants in the UK had also been looking into it.  Since the 
meeting this has continued to cause problems, most notably yesterday 
during which there was unacceptable downtime.

The business issue of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) was also 
discussed, a matter about which I had also been talking to Andy Le 
Gresley about the day before.  If a business is relying upon 
connectivity from an Internet Service Provider (ISP) for a critical 
business application (perhaps for example to host an electronic 
banking system), they should have some sort of SLA guaranteeing the 
quality of the service provided.  Such SLAs are common within the 
industry and often include rebates from ISPs if the service levels 
are not met and it seemed curious that JT do not offer them even 
without compensation.

I was advised that SLAs were currently being considered.  In my view 
JT are much less likely to be taken as a serious player in the 
Internet connection market, as well as in the Internet co-location 
market via ITSoffshore, unless SLAs are provided together with 
compensation when they are not met.  For Internet connections there 
are two distinct elements, namely the Internet bandwidth and the 
connection to JT.  The latter is obviously likely to have lower 
guarantees where the customer is fed on a single circuit.

In conclusion it is clear that Jersey Telecoms have some work to do 
in order to live up to the claims for their IBS.  In the mean time, 
customers may wish to be cautious about relying upon IBS services.  
Clearly the introduction of SLAs with compensation will concentrate 
minds on providing a good quality service.

Best wishes,
Matthew

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