Maintenance or Outage? Know Your Downtime

By Erin McKnight

While fiber stands out as the fastest, most reliable solution for rural broadband, occasional downtime occurs in the digital landscape, just like it does for electricity. Downtime can typically be classified as maintenance or outages. Let’s delve into the crucial distinctions between the two and explain why even the most robust fiber connections experience intermittent downtime.

MAINTENANCE

Maintenance plays a large role in our commitment to safety and reliability, which is why we devote time to maintaining the infrastructure and systems we’ve built. During our maintenance windows, we perform tasks such as adding security patches for network equipment, upgrading hardware for better performance, and addressing any service issues we may be having.

Like changing the oil in your car, routine network maintenance helps stop problems before they start. We often know about maintenance downtime in advance and notify our members and subscribers of the maintenance beforehand to prevent them from being surprised.

To help minimize disruptions, we perform most maintenance between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. because usage tends to be at its lowest point during this time.

Outage

We know that outages happen no matter how much work we do to keep our system in tip-top shape — Oklahoma weather has proven as much. In addition to the obvious impacts severe weather has on our infrastructure, other causes of outages range from vehicles hitting poles and underground lines being hit by someone digging, to other unexpected events.

Outages are a top priority when they occur. Our fiber and electric crews dispatch to the scene within minutes of receiving the report and work to assess the situation and restore services quickly and safely.

Because outages are unpredictable, we cannot send notifications ahead of time, large-scale outages, like those caused by a tornado, can take days to restore service. When this happens, we do our best to keep everyone updated with Facebook posts and messages on our website.

Experience a power or fiber outage in your area? Contact us at 405-217-6868 to notify our team. Our dedicated crews will respond to address the issue as soon as we’re alerted.