To ensure that we continue providing end-customers with the best broadband they can get, we’re upgrading the software in our Copper ISAMs.

Our Copper ISAM network provides copper broadband and baseband IP services to your customers, as well as supporting business services such as HSNS Lite. As part of our normal network lifecycle management, we're upgrading these nodes with the latest software.

To ensure minimal customer disruption during the software upgrade. We need your help to test your VDSL / ADSL capable modems with the new software as part of our regression testing. We have a number of your modems from previous software and hardware upgrade regression testing, but need to check they are current models with current firmware.

What's the detail?

The high-level plan for this project currently underway is:

• Perform regression testing with current services and modems. We’ll need your help by providing us with 2 modems for testing, with the latest firmware, if we don’t already have them from previous testing. This is expected to commence shortly and complete in October 2019. First we need to know more about your modems and their firmware. Please let your Service Delivery Manager know what modems you currently supply your customers and/or have in the network and their firmware version.
• Perform soak testing in production. Timing is dependent on how regression testing performs, but we'd like to start as early as possible. We welcome feedback on candidate copper ISAMs.
• Commence rollout to all ISAMs following successful soak testing and after the Rugby World Cup.

For the rollout each software upgrade will require a ~15 minute outage, as the ISAM is rebooted following an upgrade. This outage affects all broadband or baseband IP customers on the ISAM, as well as any business services, such as HSNS Lite.

Next steps

Your Service Delivery Manager will be in touch to find out what modems you have. Once we have all the data together then we can confirm what test modems we already have, and if you'd like to add other modems for us to test. We'll share test results for your specific modem(s).
 

A change description available at the end of May will provide details of the software upgrade and planned timings. This will be published and will be available via the TCF working group, your Service Delivery Managers.

For all other queries please contact your Service Delivery Manager.