Network Notice
Planned Emergency Maintenance 14 February 2024
LaserNet has been working on a few upgrades to the fibre network within Welbedacht for the past few months.
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The maintenance was initially necessitated by ongoing building works breaking fibre cables as well as torrential rains which caused the fibre ducting to sink and snap cables. In addition, the distance back to our network core is lengthy and has been subject to sabotage and other incidents in the recent past. We therefore built a new network core in Welbedacht late last year and we installed a wireless backup link to a new core within Welbedacht on Monday. Most estates have already been re-routed via fibre to this new, Welbedacht core.
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The wireless was installed on Monday. Sadly, we were finishing off the configuration when there was yet another fibre break. We are, however, pleased to announce that the wireless failover is now in place and therefore fibre breaks along the path back into town from Welbedacht will no longer affect your connection as the failover will kick in automatically.
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The damage done to our ducts and cables buried deep underground is an entirely different matter. The fibre team has been attempting to affect repairs and pull new cables with minimum disruption, however, these fixes have resulted in the need to install a brand-new cable to feed the area and to get the last of the estates routed onto the path that leads to the wireless backup link.
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In order to achieve this, we will be pulling the new cable through tomorrow morning from 8am. The team will then upgrade some of the manholes to bigger, sturdier manholes. From about 11am until about 17:00 the fibre team will commence with moving your connection from the old line to the new line. During this time, you will experience an extended outage of about 3 hours. There will also be an outage of about 30 minutes later on for the last of the estates who are being moved over to the Welbedacht core. The estates include all on Metelerkamp Street and Kurtzenhof Estate.
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We apologise for the inconvenience and leave you with our assurance that the team is doing whatever is possible to secure the fibre in the area, upgrade it to the latest technology and have all estates on two paths back to the world of internet.
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We thank you for your patience during this outage and look forward to providing you with a more secure connection in the years to come.