Staying Connected

In today's world being connected is critical for a business. To many it just looks like a jumble of cables and flickering lights. All the ports look the same. You just plug them in and it works - right? No, it is not that easy.

Recently, I started my day with the same routine. Not long after I woke up, I looked at my phone to see if there were any alerts to issues that I should resolve before heading to work. Unfortunately, on this morning, I had a dozen or so alerts about systems that were offline.

Reviewing the list, it quickly became obvious that there was a common thread in all of the issues. The fiber internet connection at the office was down. All of the services with an alert were related to the fiber. Fortunately, we have a backup connection and it was working fine and services had transferred over to it. The backup connection made this an issue we had time to resolve rather than a crisis where no one was able to work.

My regular route to work is down the road where the fiber is, so I paid closer attention to anything going on and was looking for obvious things that could be related to the fiber outage driving in that morning. As I was getting close to the office, I saw a work crew for the company that handles our fiber. I thought, "That's it" and was happy to see they were already working to get things fixed. Once I got to the office, I called support to see if they could give me any additional information or an estimate on when service could be restored. I found out this was some scheduled maintenance and they expected it to be completed soon.

By lunchtime, service was still down. I drove by where the work crew was and they were still there, but on my way back from lunch, I noticed the work crew was gone. I had not received any alerts about service being restored so I called support. They said everything was back up and working. When I let them know our connection was still down, they disagreed because according to their system all connections they monitor were up and working. After convincing them that there was still an issue, they said they were going to have to look in to it and get back with me.

It was the next day before they got back with me. They had discovered that their records were incomplete regarding our fiber. During the maintenance work they only reconnected fibers that were recorded as active. Our fiber was not listed as active so it had not been reconnected. Unfortunately, at this point they didn't even know which fiber went to our office. They had to send technicians out to locate which fiber was to our building so they could get it reconnected.

Once the fiber was reconnected — everything came back up and services returned to normal. In this case, the ultimate fix for the issue was easy — it was just reconnecting a fiber to the correct port. The time-consuming part was figuring that out. This is often the case with technology, the final solution may appear simple even though the steps of getting to that simple solution are often complex and time consuming.