We would like to take the opportunity to update our customers on service delivery for the last couple of weeks in December.

In general, the level of service we provided was high, but there are a few ongoing developments to update on.

Call Drops
Further to the network OSPF flap issue, we also replaced an ethernet switch that connects our main UK pstn gateway to the internet. This was showing some errors, and its replacement has dramatically reduced the number of call drops reported.

We do still have some customers experiencing call drops, and are working to identify whether these are related to their broadband link, or our asterisk platform, by completing some extensive stress testing of various versions of asterisk our call handling software. The initial prognosis from lab testing is that asterisk is not under normal circumstances dropping calls, and on test calls with snom phones, there is a tolerance of network conditions for up to 50% packet loss, for the asterisk to phone segment of the call.

We have done a significant amount of work on understanding call drops, and this will form the subject of a seperate blog post.

Web Hosting
We suffered a power supply failure in one of our web hosting file servers on 14th December. This was very unfortunate and caused a big outage for web hosting customers for the first hour of the 14th. However, we were able to quickly switch to a backup file server and then have an engineer replace the power supply, getting the whole service back online within 2.5 hours from the initial failure.

We will be setting out our 2008 server strategy in a seperate blog post, which will address a number of the questions that this issue raised for customers.

Mail Delivery and Mailing Lists
Our mail system continued to operate normally and we did extra work to improve spam filtering (Spamhause Zen list). We have also finished migrating customers mailman services to a our new mailman server which has improved the service.

Customer Support
Response times from customer support has been good with a number of long standing customer and 2nd line issues being resolved. Customer Support in the run up to the christmas period was reasonably quiet.

Platform Development
We have been working on our deployment of our VMWare platform, as well as migrating files to our GFS based SAN. We also completed development of our high quality broadband product and provisioned a number of test lines. Finally, we have been working

Conclusion
We have been able to continue resolving outstanding issues and increasing the resiliance of our services.