As you may know, Highlands Fiber Network experienced some disruptions in service over this past weekend. In addition, network administrators have been conducting several maintenance events over the past week that may have impacted your utilization of HFN services. HFN wanted to share with you further details on the past week’s events and why these events occurred.
Our network, and specifically the fiber optic network feed that connects HFN to the Internet runs over a very powerful physical ring to Seattle which affords us (normally) a very high reliability factor. Part of this network is run through other 3rd party providers, effectively as a lease, which is very common in this industry. Part of that fiber ring is requiring a reconfiguration, which is occurring on Tuesday, June 20th in an early morning maintenance window. You should have already received an email notice about this event. Information regarding this event is also posted on our network status page at http://hfnet.us/netstatus.
This reconfiguration (required by WSDOT with very short notice), was set to bring down all internet traffic for several hours, and not only to HFN. HFN engineers, in an attempt to minimize this downtime, accelerated some of our own network upgrades which were planned for the future. We felt that if we could get these done, the larger impact to our customers would be greatly reduced.
The reason that HFN had to conduct maintenance outages over the weekend was to get these network modifications in place before the 20th. It took a few attempts to get the new configurations and equipment in place, and during this time some users experienced an outage, or slow speeds, outside of the planned maintenance windows. We do strive to maintain a reliable and fast network, and we make every attempt to minimize even maintenance disruptions.
We appreciate your patience while we have worked through this process. We will continue to make adjustments leading into and following the planned maintenance on the 20th. We also have a set maintenance window planned for the 29th as our team works to further expand new equipment upgrades. As a reminder, if you experience a service disruption at any time please contact HFN technical support at 425-427-0999 or by email at support@hfnservices.com.
Thank you for your continued support.
Sincerely,
Highlands Fiber Network
