As you are probably aware A&A develops its own network hardware under the FireBrick brand. We have been, for some time now, using a mixture of the older "FB6000" and the newer "FB9000" models as BGP routers, L2TP routers and LNSs which terminate customer broadband connections; For the most part the FB9000 LNSs have been is use for customers with faster speed lines. We've been using FB9000s for our L2TP services and as BGP routers for over a year now.
You might have seen that we did have some stability problems earlier in the roll out of the FB9000 for our LNS platform and therefore paused the deployment. For some months now, we have running firmware with well established stability and as such will be rolling out FB9000s in replacement of all older FB6000 LNS. This work will happen in small stages during June and July.
This will be mildly customer impacting, causing a brief outage as each line moves across, but no worse than any common LNS firmware update like we have been doing consistently for years. We will do migrations in the early hours of the morning and according to your preferences in the control pages.
We will post updates to this status post when parts of this wider project are scheduled. eg when we schedule moving a set of customers off a specific LNS on to a new one.
We have multiple interlinks to TalkTalk that carry our broadband traffic. TalkTalk have scheduled planned work on both these links during a four week period from Tuesday 23rd April until 16th May. (Specifically midnight to 6AM on 23rd, 25th, 25th April and 1st, 2nd, 9th, 16th May.
Due to the work being carried out (Software updates of their "LTSs") we are unable to move traffic seamlessly between our interlinks and so TalkTalk customers will see their connections drop and reconnect on these early mornings.