Internet Backbone upgrade and Router upgrade

We have upgraded our backbone fiber connections and our Core router handling the backbone connections. This new circuit doubles our Internet speed and capacity and also allows for much greater future growth. The new router more than quadruples the processing power and speed of it's predecessor. However, during the middle of the circuit upgrade this afternoon that was scheduled to take place from 6:00pm to 6:02pm, the switch technicians ran into some programming complications that turned a 2 minute cut-over into an all-nighter. Fortunately, we were only down for a little over an hour but they worked on it until after midnight to make sure nothing else went wrong. Some routing updates may have caused some users to experience a loss of connectivity during this time. We now have restored everything back to working condition and have made the cutover to the new circuit.

Thank you for your understanding.

Rocky Point Power Outage

The storm knocked out power to the Rocky Point Tower early this morning and the generator's propane tank ran out of propane causing the whole site to loose power for most of the day. A crew went up to refill the tank and restore power. The power was restored around 5 p.m.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Happy Holidays from all of us at ReliaNET

Thank you for a successful year. Our upcoming Holiday schedule and hours are as follows:

Closed November 26th for Thanksgiving
Open December 24th until 1pm
Closed December 25th
Open December 26th
Open December 31st until 1pm
Closed January 1st
Open January 2nd

New orders will still be processed, emergency voicemail will still be responded to.

Ogden Power Outages

Rocky Mountain Power reported over 20,000 customers losing power throughout the morning in Ogden, South Ogden, Huntsville and several other cities. We don't have any further information. Our generators kept everything running fine with the exception of one UPS system that failed with a couple of servers on it that were transferred to an alternate UPS and restored to service. We did lose a few phones during the outage as some tech phones did not have backup power yet.

Roy Power outage

Rocky Mountain Power is reporting 1900 customers are without power in the Roy area (including our tower) due to a power pole catching fire around 9 p.m. and burning during the heavy electrical storm that passed through. They estimate that the power to be restored by or before 3:30 a.m. Our system is currently running on batteries but they may be exhausted before the power is restored.

Fiber-optic circuit outage

An ELI fiber-optic circuit went down this morning (possibly due to some storm related incident) causing a disruption to our Internet backbone service. ELI quickly dispatched a technician that ran a full battery of tests on the fiber switches and found a failed a line card. He also made some improved adjustments to the charge controllers on the backup batteries. The backup batteries were upgraded from the standard 35 amp hour batteries to 50 amp hour batteries which will significantly extend the run-time of the fiber switch. We suspect a voltage fluctuation caused the line card failure.

AP replaced at Rocky Point

We replaced the South facing AP at Rocky Point today as it was locking up occasionally over the past few days. We hope that this will cure the problems that it was having.

We apologize for the inconvenience. The AP was down for about an hour while we replaced it.

We have also installed some new higher powered AP's onsite as well for those with any signal problems.

As always, we thank you for your patience and understanding.

New DSL ATM Circuit move

On April 8th at approximately 1:00 a.m. MST Qwest will be moving our ATM circuit over to a new and improved platform. We anticipate this to be completed within a couple of hours. All DSL customers will be affected by this for a brief period of time as they are individually moved from the old circuit to the new one. All VPI/VCI's will remain the same. This means that no one will need to make any changes in their routers. Some may need to power cycle their routers to get them to re-connect. We apologize for the somewhat late warning. This move was requested by Qwest and we were just informed of this timeframe.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Excessive High-incoming line voltage spikes cause many problems.

At precisely 9:11 p.m. last night, 5 towers in the Weber County Area logged high incoming line voltage spikes. At 9:25 p.m. they hit again, only much more severely at Rocky Point. It blew out all the Trans-tector surge protector modules for the entire building. It knocked out our battery system and most of the State and County safety radios. We were able to have our system back online around 9:00 this morning.

In the Huntsville and Eden areas, several users reported power problems which actually caused a number of Linksys WRT54G routers to reset themselves to factory defaults. To our knowledge, our technicians have helped all those customers affected by that power problem in those areas, if you are having a problem, please contact Tech Support.

This is one of the main reasons why we recommend all customers to plug their sensitive computer/routers and radios into UPS's for their protection (especially in the Ogden Valley Area). Those with UPS's did not have any problems.

New 10-digit dialing required in the 801 Area Code

As of March 1st, everyone in the 801 Area code will need to dial 10 digits (Area Code + number) to place calls. This means that all ReliaNET customers will need to update their Dial up network connections to do the same. This affects all customers in Ogden, SLC, and Provo only.

List of Dial up Numbers

More information from the Utah Public Utilities commission.

To Change Your Local Access Number in Windows XP & Vista, edit the ReliaNET connection properties.

1. From the Start menu, click Connect To, and choose your ReliaNET connection Icon (if you don't see it there, go into your Control Panel from the Start menu and double-click "Network Connections").
2. Click the Properties button.
3. Now simply add "801" in front of your existing dialup number the contents of the Phone number field. i.e. "8014099000" you don't need any dashes or a "1".
4. Click the OK button.
5. Click the Dial button to connect using the new 10-digit number.

You have successfully changed your Local Access Number in Windows XP.

Clinton and Eden router failures

Due to the winter storms, we had two separate routers fail. One in Clinton, one in Eden. The Clinton router was replaced late this afternoon, and we will have the Eden router replaced by tomorrow morning (Friday). We apologize for the inconvenience.

Happy Holidays from all of us at ReliaNET

Thank you for a successful year.

Holiday Hours:

Open December 24th from 9am to 1pm
Closed December 25th
Open December 26th
Open December 31st from 9am to 1pm
Closed January 1st
Open January 2nd

New orders for services will still be processed, emergency voicemail will still be responded to.

Authentication Server drive failure

Even though we go to great lengths to ensure high availability of services, there is always a chance of equipment failure. This afternoon a boot drive failed in our primary authentication server causing an interruption of service to those users trying to connect to the Internet and also to those trying to access email. We were able to get the services back up, but only after all the database tables had been repaired. Unfortunately, that took quite some time to repair due to the size of the database. All the data was safe and located on multiple drives in a RAID configuration, but the boot drive had to be replaced. We will be working on making that server more stable in the future to prevent a single drive failure causing such a lengthy outage.

We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

Integra PRI outage

Integra Telecom's maintenance group caused a PRI outage this morning on our main Dialup Circuit. This caused all calls to ring busy until we notified them and they were able to resolve the problem.

PPPoE Server Restored

A PPPoE server log filled up the log disk with data and stopped the server from accepting logins for a brief period of time this morning. We were able to move the log files off that disk and restore the service. We will be upgrading the disk space to ensure trouble-free service in the future.

Routing Problems Resolved

During some routine maintenance of one our our Core BGP routers, the routing table overflowed and crashed. This caused many customers to loose connectivity briefly while it reloaded the routes, however, many of the edge routers had received the bad routes from the core router and had to be reloaded as well. This took longer than usual in some areas (backup links/routers where used in the interim to keep customers connected).

We are now implementing additional procedures to help prevent something like this from happening in the future.

Layton East Bench Tower site upgraded

We upgraded the Layton East Bench Tower site today with Dual, redundant radios (along with a spare) with increased speeds and throughput. We also resolved a few connector problems that had been causing a few intermittent outages in the last few weeks.

New VoIP compatible Alarm monitoring service available.

We are excited to introduce our new $14.95 Broadband compatible Security Alarm monitoring service that is now available. This service is ideal for customers with existing alarm monitoring service who would like additional features with their security system at a lower price, or to customers who are interested in either installing their own security system for their home or office or having us install a security system for them. This new service is compatible with phone lines, broadband VoIP, or cellular service. Your monitoring service comes complete with a customized web login for you to control all aspects of your security system.

More information can be found here http://www.relia.net/security

West Ogden service upgraded.

There was some intermittent connectivity issues in West Ogden in the last few days due to some power outages combined with failed emergency backup batteries. The batteries were replaced today and re-calibrated.

ReliaNET welcomes orphaned Sprint Wireless Broadband customers who will loose their service effective 7/08.

Sprint announced that they will be discontinuing their Wireless Broadband Direct service in July 2008. Those with the 14-inch Diamond Sprint Wireless antenna will be loosing their service soon. We are ready to help re-connect those people and in most cases may be able to keep their Internet up and running without disconnection.

New Circuit Readiness

We are very excited to be in the final stages of the most significant service upgrade we have ever had here at ReliaNET! We are getting ready to turn up our new Level3 Fiber circuit. In anticipation of turning up this new circuit we are modifying the configuration of our routers and fine tuning them. This should not cause any significant connectivity problems, but the routers will be undergoing some maintenance throughout the next 7 days. We want to warn everyone in advance that there may be some very brief outages as we turn up these brand new services. There was a momentary outage on the core router as the new routes overloaded the memory in the router and we had to increase the memory in the router. We had anticipated that this may happen and had the additional memory on hand and ready to go.

Gigabit (1Gb) Network Operation Center Upgrade

We are nearing the completion of our NOC upgrade to Gigabit ethernet (1000BaseT). We have installed new cabling, new switches, and new management patch panels for easier access and upgrades. The upgrade will provide more than adequate capacity to continue to handle the current growth and speed of our network. Our mail servers, DNS servers, Anti-spam servers, and web servers have already been switched over to the new Gigabit ethernet. The remaining servers will be migrated shortly.

We are also preparing for a major new High Speed Fiber circuit upgrade. We will be installing a new faster Cisco VXR router that will double the processing power of our current network, as well as doubling the capacity and speed of our backbone to the Internet...more details coming soon.

High Speed DSL now available in Eden, UT

We are pleased to announce the availability of High Speed DSL in Eden, UT. Some areas of Eden now qualify for DSL, please contact our office if you would like more information on DSL or if you would like to see if you qualify for High Speed DSL.

Rocky Point issues resolved

We are pleased to announce that we have resolved the OSPF routing issues at the Rocky Point site. We also upgraded the main router which has a more powerful processor, new radios, and supports gigabit ethernet for future growth and speed capabilities. We restructured the site to help reduce single points of failure and increase the redundancy.

Thank you for your patience.

Rocky Point Tower issues

We have been working very hard to resolve an OSPF routing bug which has been causing some connectivity problems during the past few days with one of the main routers at Rocky Point (some issues that began two weeks ago have already been improved with the newer firmware while a few more remain). We have been closely monitoring the links and are taking every opportunity to remedy the situation. We will be working round the clock in order to stabilize the situation. Replacement equipment is on hand if necessary.

We appreciate your patience in this matter as the trouble-shooting requires frequent restarting of the routers and services which causes a brief outage which does not typically require a reboot of customer equipment. The connections should come back up on their own.

Record Snow Storms cause outages for many in Eden

Deep snow and heavy ice has continued to build up over the last few days to record levels in over 10 years in the Ogden Valley area. Many customers had antennas covered in snow, cables ripped out by heavy ice build-up, and high wind related problems all caused by a series of winter storms. As long as customers carefully remove snow buildup around antennas, they shouldn't experience too many problems. Also make sure there is no ice buildup or icicles in front of any antennas or dishes. Some areas had snow drifts over 6 feet tall. Take extra caution when digging or clearing around cables to not damage them.

We also worked on the Eden tower and found some ice buildup had shifted one of our antennas causing lower than usual signal levels. It was cleared and corrected.

Qwest Outage in Huntsville

Several Qwest circuits in the Huntsville area went down this morning. We had Qwest dispatch line technicians who were able to find the problem and fix it. We're not exactly sure of the scope of the problem but we are aware of at least 4 of our circuits that were affected along with circuits belonging to other residents. We brought most service back up via backup circuits during the outage. Once Qwest restored the circuits, service automatically switched back. Sometimes, events like this may require a reboot on the customers equipment to come back online properly.

Clinton Outage

Heavy Storms caused an outage in Clinton this morning for about an hour. We are working on new procedures that will help reduce weather related outages in the future. Thank you for your patience.

Office Line Outage

Qwest was scheduled to do some un-intrusive maintenance on our main Office telephone lines tomorrow morning, but jumped the gun and ended up doing it early this morning. Once they realized they had interrupted our phone service, they quickly fixed it. The lines were out for a brief period of time.

The maintenance was completed shortly thereafter and all lines were restored.

Power Outage in Huntsville

A large power outage in Huntsville caused many to lose power this evening for a short time. Most of our equipment remained up and running on emergency backup power.

Rocky Mountain Power Outage

Rocky Mountain Power is shutting off power in the Huntsville, UT area from 10:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. for maintenance. We were only made aware of the power outage late this evening. We are not sure how many people this outage will effect.

Perry, Brigham Upgrades

Access Points in Perry and Brigham were all upgraded today. These new Access Points are capable of faster data rates and improved features and capabilities.

Access Point Firmware bug

We discovered a bug in the new software that we loaded on one of the Wireless Access Points off our Main tower in Ogden. This bug was causing excessive packet loss on the ethernet link side of the radio which resulted in very slow connection speeds. After trouble-shooting various possibilities, we downgraded the router to the previous version, and the packet loss went away and the Access Point began to respond normally. Occasionally these things happen on newer firmware that is beyond our control. We try and make sure all firmware is stable before installing it on our Access Points, however, because of the various configurations, they don't always behave the same.

Hooper Tower Upgrades

Our Hooper tower Access Points were all upgraded today. There were some brief outages as a result for cable and power to be transferred to the new AP's. These new Access Points are capable of faster data rates and improved features and capabilities.

Router Upgrades

Several tower routers were upgraded early this morning to improve stability, resolve minor bugs and add additional features and capabilities.

Most upgrades cause a 3-5 minute outage and are done during off-peak hours.

Heavy Storms cause outages

Electrical Storms yesterday caused outages in Clinton, Layton, and Ogden.

Lightning Strikes caused the majority of problems. Most issues were resolved yesterday, the tower above WSU should be back online later this afternoon.

ELI Fiber Maintenance

Last night at 11:00 p.m. ELI had an emergency card replacement issue that lasted 8 minutes.

Tonight ELI has some maintenance to perform at 11:30 p.m. that may last up to 30 minutes to repair some fiber damage to one of their circuits from SLC to Sacramento, CA. This may affect our customers. Please call with any questions or concerns.

New Contact Phone numbers

We now have a local contact number in Brigham City and Park City. Please use those numbers instead of the Toll Free 800 number to contact our offices.

New Brigham City Area Number:
435-553-4513

New Park City Number:
435-565-4550

Qwest DSL Outage

Qwest had a problem on one of their network DSLAM's this morning around 10:40 a.m. which caused a small handful of customers to lose connectivity. We reported the problem to Qwest and opened a trouble ticket. They had it resolved around 1:20 p.m. No further information was given to us.

Powder Mountain Upgrades

We've upgraded service again! This time at Powder Mountain.

We installed newer equipment to allow for faster speeds and higher capacity. We increased the coverage area around the resort. We added redundant links to provide a more reliable service, and we replaced the batteries in our UPS that had overheated and failed.

We also had fans and additional 'breathing' holes added to reduce the heat buildup that has caused some connectivity issues recently.

Anyone wishing to upgrade their equipment should contact support and request it to be done before the winter season.

We also added additional High Speed Internet coverage for the Nordic Valley area.

WSU Tower Outage

An Access Point on our tower above Weber State University failed this morning at 5:05 a.m. We were able to get it back online temporarily while we prepared replacement equipment. We upgraded and replaced all devices at the tower and had it all back online around 3:00 p.m.

This new equipment has faster processing power, newer technology, and is capable of faster speeds. We also increased the data rates and speeds available to customers.

In addition, any customers that would like to upgrade the equipment on their end can call to arrange a service call upgrade for only $88 (this will include a newer/faster radio and board).

Rocky Mountain Power Outage

Rocky Mountain Power informed us that they have over 4000 customers in the Eden-Liberty UT area without power as of 2:42 MST. They do not have an estimated time of repair at this time, crews have been dispatched to resolve the problem.

All towers in the Valley are effected by this, however, are up and running on emergency battery backup.

Update: 7/15/07 Brief power outages continue around the Valley as Rocky Mountain Power fixes the problems throughout the area. These intermittent power outages may require customers to reboot their rooftop radio devices to re-connect. If you know you will be without power or the power lines are being worked on, we recommend that you fully unplug your radio and computer devices from the wall just to be on the safe side.

Routing updates

We updated all the routers in Ogden Valley this morning after we found what appeared to be a bug in the routing software that may have been contributing to recent outages. This may have caused a brief 10 minute outage during the upgrade process in several areas. We will be monitoring these routers closely for the next 7 days.

Rocky Mountain Power Outage

Rocky Mountain Power disconnected over 280 customers in the Huntsville Area for some power-line upgrades this morning causing an outage for some customers between the hours of 9 a.m. and 12 p.m.

ELI OC3 Fiber Outage

ELI had an OC3 fiber card failure this evening at 20:23 MST. The protect card did not fail over properly as it should have. ELI was able to manually switch service over to the fail-over card while they replaced the failed card.

ELI is checking into why the protect card did not function properly.

Hard Drive Failure

A hard drive containing several personal Home directories on /home failed on Friday. Unfortunately the mirrored backup drive also failed. We were able to replace the drives, but are not going to be able to restore any files. If you have been affected by this, we apologize and will help you upload any files that you need from your personal backups. Our main file systems are stored separate than personal web pages and were not effected.

Email being rejected by MSN, Hotmail, and Comcast

Emails sent by relia.net customers were being rejected by MSN, Hotmail, and Comcast servers yesterday and today due to a reported SPAM incident.

We were able to quickly identify and terminate the offending spammer who fraudulently signed up for our service from China with the sole intention of spamming MSN, Hotmail, and Comcast e-mail addresses. Even though he was caught very quickly before he was able to send out much spam, the spam that he did sent out was a well-known type of Spam that MSN, Hotmail, and Comcast have been looking for and receiving tons of lately and simply blocked it all.

We did get it all resolved today and have added additional measures in our signup system to prevent fraudulent subscriptions from happening in the future.

Free, anonymous, and large email servers like MSN, Hotmail, and Comcast are frequent targets for spammer's. We continue to invest more resources in fighting spammers, and have recently added an additional two Spam Assassin 'Anti-Spam' servers to help stay ahead of the ever-increasing amounts of SPAM, and currently block 100's of thousands of Junk emails every day from ever reaching your inbox.

Qwest performed some maintenance in one of their remote terminals in Huntsville last night which caused some problems with several of our circuits in the area. We did open a ticket with them and they are working to resolve those issues. This maintenance affected T1, DSL, and wireless customers. We will be making sure service is restored properly for those that were affected.

There is a major fiber outage in the Salt Lake, Ogden, and Logan areas that is currently effecting our dial up lines as well as our technical support lines. This outage is affecting many businesses along the Wasatch front. The phone company is working hard to restore services as quick as possible. All other services are operating normally. The problem began around 8 a.m. this morning and is expected to be resolved by 4 p.m. this afternoon. Both Power and phone crews were dispatched to the site immediately to fix the problem.

update: a power transformed caught fire and burned some fiber lines that had to be bypassed. all services were restored by 3:15 p.m.

ReliaNET is pleased to announce it's latest hotspot at the Mt. Ogden Park in Ogden. High speed Internet access is available FREE around the south end of the park at the Bowery to all ReliaNET customers.

ReliaNET currently has other Hotspot servers available to it's customers in other Areas of Ogden including Downtown Ogden.

There was a brief power outage in Liberty and Eden this morning from 6:30 a.m. until 10 a.m. Our UPS system maintained power to our equipment until 9 am after which the batteries were depleted. No details are available at this time as to the cause.

A pole fire causes a power outage to thousands of residents in Huntsville and Eden this morning including two of our towers. Rocky Mountain Power dispatched repair crews at 8 am to restore power. The estimated time for the power outage to be resolved is by 1 pm today.

Everything went well on our new link to Nordic Valley, we also added additional coverage to the North Fork area, Liberty, and Avon.

We've upgraded two wireless links in Huntsville and Eden from 10 Megabits to 45 Megabits for added speeds and growth that we are seeing in the Ogden Valley.

We will be upgrading additional links to Nordic and the rest of the valley over the next few weeks.

For up to 30 minutes between the hours of 11 pm and 5 am MST, our upstream provider will be moving our DS3 over to a new state of the art OC192 router.

This move is expected to go without incident and should improve the overall speed and capabilities of our already fast fiber-optic back bone Internet Connection.