Updated 9:01 p.m.A piece of networking equipment failed Sunday morning at the Mooresville-based MI-Connection Communications System, cutting off access to most of the system’s internet customers in the Lake Norman Area. The outage also affected the company’s customer support phone lines, which were out most of the day.
As of 4:30 p.m., engineers had identified the problem and were repairing the equipment, General Manager Alan Hall said. By around 5 p.m., customers were reporting that their connections were working again, and the system was full restored by Sunday evening, Mr. Hall said.
Mr. Hall said he first learned of the outage around 9:40 a.m. Engineers blamed the problem on a failed networking switch. A backup system also failed.
“It was a piece of network equipment, a switch. It was supposed to have built-in redundancy, but it failed in such a away that it did not work. We’re trying to figure out why,” Mr. Hall said around 4:30 Sunday afternoon.
Some MI-Connection telephone customers also were affected, though cable TV service was not.
Later Sunday, he said the offending equipment had been repaired. “We are working to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he said.
MI-Connection has about 9,300 internet customers and about 2,000 local telephone customers in Mooresville, Davidson, Cornelius and surrounding areas.
- David Boraks, DavidsonNews.net
At least we had phone service at our house all day. (Via DavidsonNews.net’s Facebook page)
I would like to suggest the Town issue an automated phone call to notify residents whenever these outages occur. The Town has the ability to issue an automated phone notification to the residents/owners of MI Connection. We spent over an hour trying to figure out what the problem was, checking the modem, turning the computer off, going through the Connection Doctor, having my son look at it, having my husband look at it, etc. We finally figured out it was a problem with MI-Connection when our repeated attempts to contact them resulted in a busy signal. I think the Town should notify customers when this occurs because many people are conducting important business and need to know what’s going on. thanks, Lynn
I think Lynn’s idea of the town using its autodialer to notify residents of outages like this is a good one, but it begs the question as to why the Town has to do this in the first place. MI-Connection should have the appropriate systems and back-ups in place so that when a problem occurs there is (a) a recording and (b) a notice on the website telling customers that there is a widespread outage (like Duke Energy does). Unfortunately, it appears that MI has one switch which when tripped takes out both the internet and its customer service phones – a strange and obviously unworkable structure as we all learned this weekend.
I’m not keen on the idea of the town being the entity that notifies citizens in the event of an outage at MI-Connection. That is the role of MI-Connection, and hopefully after this event they’ll put some better systems in place that provide that capability.
If the town is to notify citizens, then the notification should go to all citizens. The towns of Davidson and Mooresville should not be getting subscriber lists. The local governments have no right or need to know who is and who is not a subscriber to MI-Connection.