Storm Related Damage

We are fighting spring storms again today.  We've got a couple of sites offiline right now.  We will be working to bring these back online when the storms clear in a couple hours:

Down Sites:
27th & Bluestem
Meadowbrooke Bldg CC

We've also lost the equipment that serves the fiber on the 1400 block of Tennessee.  This area is on a backup link for now.  We will be deploying replacement equipment tomorrow and should have this area back on its primary (1.4 Gbps) infrastructure some time tomorrow.

Wicked Broadband Featured in ArsTechnica

Wicked Broadband is being featured again today in ArsTechnica

One big reason we lack Internet competition: Starting an ISP is really hard

Electrical Outage

Westar is showing 2,319 addresses offline right now.  All of our core sites are working fine (6th St. is on generator power), but we have a lot of small sites in local neighborhoods that are offline.

Most of these will come back up when power is restored, but it will be a day or so before we restore power to each and every site.

Thanks for your patience as we work to restore service.

Props to Lionell & Dan

A power adapter at our 18th & Kasold site started freaking out two days ago and has been causing intermittent issues for folks who live in and around Meadowbrooke Apts.

It went down for good yesterday evening at 5:45 PM or so.

I'd like to thank Lionell for staying late, doing a tower climb and fixing the issue after hours.

You might know Lionell as the friendly gentleman you speak to on the phone if your call our offices.  What you might not know is that he has a background in military radio communications and helps with field work on a regular basis.

Everyone on our technology team takes a turn as the on-call operator once every three weeks.  They give up their weekends and time with their families to keep the network running.  I'd like to thank both Dan and Lionell for the hard work they do day in and day out to keep the network running smoothly.

DDoS

We've been the target of distributed denial of service attacks on a couple occasions in the past week.

We just experienced an attack at around 12:22 PM today.  We contacted our upstream carrier and had the attack mitigated by 12:26 PM.

For folks who are interested in what these attacks are, here is a link.  They are relatively easy to mitigate once we've identified the target, but can cause momentary inconvenience while we work to identify the problem.

Business Service

Just installed new business service at Midwest Property Management.

Speedtesting 1 Gbps service is difficult, but here is the results at this site:



If your business Internet is too slow, why not give us a call?  (785) 371 4214

Network Congestion

We've identified a point of network congestion that is slowing traffic down as we reach our peak usage around 11 PM.

Looking at network traffic, it appears that we've had slowdowns from around 10:00 PM to midnight each of the last two nights (since the students returned from spring break).

I've purchased a server to better manage traffic at the point of congestion and am configuring it as I write this.

I am going to try to be slick and bring this server online at 6:00 PM today, but if I can't do it without causing a network outage I'll need to install it and change the requisite routes at around 4:00 AM tomorrow.

That means another slowdown tonight from 10:00 PM to Midnight.

Thank you for your patience as we work to improve service for everyone.