The byzantine network anatomy of escalating acronyms

Some of us have real difficulties coping when the Internet goes out!

For reasons which are too embarrassing to relate, I needed to remain in a vertical position throughout last Friday night. The Internet was to be my chosen companion into the wee hours.

But, at around 12:30am when I went to extend my streak on NYT’s Wordle game, my oh-so-fickle companion of choice deserted me. Two reboots of the network hub did nothing to restore my sanity - or the Internet. (Sadly, I don’t have one of those superior hubs with a SIM included as a backup network.)

There’s an email that has just arrived on my mobile telling of an unscheduled NBN outage. Ahh. So it’s not just me then. It’s a wider problem. That should up the priority. Perhaps it will be fixed by the morning. I checked the NBN site for outages. Typed in my address. No known problems it says, check with your service provider.

A few hours later I do check my account on my provider’s website. I see a 6.33am message “A technician is expected on-site at 8:00am to replace a suspected faulty booster and pre amplifier card.” Sounds promising. That ETA is later deferred to 10:30am.

At 11:22am Saturday it seems that the cause of the outage is now due to the “DWDM sub-rack” being damaged. DWDM? That must be the clever Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing unit that packages/unpackages heaps of separate message streams and scrunches them down single strands of fibre. It can see more colours than a rainbow. 

The NBN website still tells me my access should be okay. My provider explains that sometimes NBN will assign a large number of services to an individual incident and keep it fairly internal. This results in it not being on the public outage map. But the network should be fixed soon they say – fingers crossed.

I set up my mobile as a hotspot so I can play Wordle. I do have priorities. I don’t want my “streak” to end prematurely. PSALM in three. That was lucky.

Oh no. Now I see that the replacement DWDM gizmo thingy now won’t arrive until 9:30pm so a fix will have to wait until Sunday at 7am. Then there’s another delay. Make that 10:30am.

At 11:50am Sunday we hear that the technician is replacing the faulty hardware. An ETR will be provided shortly. That must mean estimated time to repair I guess. Surely, we must be getting close to a fix.

No news is not good news. At 2:34pm someone adds a message “Hey Team, Update pls? Thank You”.

Twenty minutes later a reply. The CCMP controller card is now being replaced. CCMP? Sounds a simple acronym. I look it up. “Counter Mode with Cipher Block Chaining Message Authentication Code Protocol.” Ummm. Really? Why isn’t the acronym CMCBCMACP? Never mind.

By 4:41pm the CCMP has been installed and the technician is working with NBN tier 3 support to configure it. Outages like this are always bound to end in “tiers” one way or the other! But 3rd Tier sounds like a wedding cake.

A message pops up on my mobile phone warning that I have already used 5GB of data. Oops.

Looks like the configuration files have been corrupted. That's not good. I hope they had a backup. After midnight, the technician on-site calls it a night. It's an OHS issue: they've worked an excessively long shift. The ticket of work is put on hold.

On Sunday night, NBN finally admitted that there is a problem at my address. Monday morning they even give an ETR of 1:00pm. No, they have changed that to 9pm now.* Not that I’m stressed or anything. I have already done today’s Wordle. Fluked it in 2 for the second day in a row. Who needs the NBN?

^{* Finally some success. They managed to beat that 9pm ETR by more than 5 hours.}