Fibre cut, Vandalism, Start.ca and Rogers TPIA

I’m greeted on a nice Sunday November morning with an internet outage.

A public ip address is assigned to the cable modem yet I cannot access anything outside of the internal network. Some quick checks using ping, traceroute and other tools have me scratching my head. A router reset along with the modem itself makes no difference. The lights on the modem are all correct too.

The cable modem is connected to the network and everything on the surface looks correct yet it is not.

A quick call to the start.ca help line greets me with a message about there being a fibre cut and Rogers has been notified. The call then hangs up on me.

Odd behaviour if you ask me. There isn’t even an option to connect to an agent.

I check my trusty smokeping instance and notice the line has gone dead around 5:40 am.

Dead as a doornail.

The service ends up being reconnected 11 hours later around 4:40 pm.

The Start.ca website states the following when I come back online:

Vandalism… interesting.

Regional Internet Outage Alert: We’re aware of a regional internet outage affecting our internet customers in areas across Ontario, such as Toronto, London, St. Thomas, Kitchener, and Ottawa. The issue has been identified as a fibre cut, due to vandalism. We are hoping to see that this issue is repaired by 7PM. Thank you for your patience.

The work being done according to their social media page. Copper thieves are the culprit? When in doubt take it all I guess…

A few internet searches later I find that people were attempting to call in to start.ca before 9 am. Apparently, the isp only has support hours between 9-5 these days. I distinctly remember calling in the early hours of morning with issues in the past.

The grapevine says these 9-5 hours were implemented before the Telus merger apparently. I’m generally quite surprised it isn’t 24/7 anymore.

According to the website their hours are 8-9pm EST.

Confirmed support hours as of 2024-11-24

Not having 24/7 technical support on an isp is a big red flag in my view. I can only imagine how this will turn out going forward given the cost cutting measures I’ve already seen implemented since the takeover.

TPIA (Third Party Internet Access) has taken a very disturbing turn for years now…