Wireless Washtenaw Network Outage.

On Thursday, April 26th, the Wireless Washtenaw network was out of service from 1pm until 3pm.

Here is a quick explanation of the day’s events. 

First a little background on our setup. We have two feeds to and from the Internet.  CenturyTel is our primary feed connected through our main router and Norlight is our back-up feed connected through a backup router.

If something were to happen to our CenturyTel feed, the main router would detect it and signal to open up the backup Norlight connection.

What appears to have happened is our main router detected some kind of anomaly with the primary CenturyTel feed.  Each time the anomaly appeared it would switch to our backup router and activate the Norlight backup.  When the anomaly went away, our main router would begin using CenturyTel again. The anomaly and the switching back and forth happened several million times on Thursday.

With all the erroneous switching taking place and the possibility the anomaly was flooding the router with looped requests, the router became overloaded as it tried to process all the requests in its queue.

The most unfortunate thing for us (besides of course the worst thing of customers not getting service they expect) is the overloaded main router was so backed-up, we could not get into its administrative program to determine the anomaly.

Please accept our sincere apology for this inconvenience.  Rest assured we are working with all involved to resolve this issue. Also, we are upgrading our main router and implementing new procedures to catch the anomaly before it affects our entire customer base.

20/20 Communications was selected by Washtenaw County to provide county-wide Wireless Internet access.

There are four (4) phases to Wireless Washtenaw:
Pilot
Pre-deployment
Deployment
Customer acquisition and retention.

The phases will begin to overlap as portions of them are completed throughout the county.

If you have questions or would like to register for the service when it’s in your area, visit our Wireless Washtenaw website www.2020comm.com