Poor Design

Our home experienced an Internet outage over the weekend. The technical explanation is that the “Port” had locked.  In English, the system at SURE decided that something had gone wrong with our connection to their systems so the Port (a sort of entry gateway into their systems) shut down to protect itself and the systems behind it.  Not, you might argue, an unreasonable action, but this is where it gets interesting.

It did that at around 1am on Saturday.  We did not realise we had been disconnected until 2pm on Saturday, when we tried to use the Internet.  Call technical support and get it fixed?  Well that would be nice, but SURE does not provide any technical support at weekends.  Indeed, after the “Customer Care” centre closes at 12:00 on a Saturday it seems there is no way to speak to anybody at SURE about anything at all until 8am on Monday (or Tuesday, if Monday is a Public Holiday).  I tried every number in the ‘phone book to, attempting to speak to a human being, but apart from the ‘Faults’ line - which connected me with someone in the Falklands who had trouble speaking English and, when she understood my problem, could not help me – I could not even report the fault until Monday.  So the Internet was out all weekend until a technician arrived at work on Monday, when it took a few seconds to fix.

It seems to me that this is an incredibly unhelpful design.  I agree, it is reasonable that a Port should, if it detects a problem, shut down the connection.  But if there is not going to be anyone available to manually re-set it, surely it should have been designed to automatically re-set itself after, say, 10 minutes, and only if the problem is still occurring after 3 resets should it require a manual reset.

Or SURE could have a technician on call 24/7, as does every other Internet Service Provider on the planet, who could divert him/herself from Minecraft for the few seconds it would take to reset my port.

In the majority of the world the Internet is seen as an essential resource.  You would no more expect to be without Internet all weekend than you would expect to be without electricity or water.  Even Connect St Helena has an out-of-hours fault line.

What if I had been a business user, with an online presence connecting me 24/7 to my customers around the world?  What might they have concluded if I just disappeared off the Internet for two days?  What if I’d been a student trying to cram for an exam first thing on Monday?  What if I needed to upload something to meet a deadline with severe financial penalties?  What if I’d had a poorly pet and wanted to check the Internet to see if it was worth dragging the vet away from their Sunday?  What about my weekly Sunday Skype call to my aging relative overseas? What if I’m the Governor and I want to liaise with London about a fleet of Chinese ships massing in James Bay prior to an invasion?

The Internet is no longer an optional extra.

If Governor Rushbrook is serious about improving our economy by promoting the growth of businesses he could do worse than demand our Government-monopoly Internet Service Provider actually provides an Internet Service suited to 2019, not one that would have been barely adequate in 1999.