Over the last few years, we have begun transitioning products and services from the Regional Ethernet Network (REN) to the newer upgraded Fibre Access Network (FAN) in our exchanges. This work is critical in upgrading our infrastructure and replacing the REN hardware that is out of support and has a limited lifespan. We must complete this work to avoid significant outages of customer services running on the REN network.

In early 2023, we set up the REN end-of-life programme to manage all the changes impacting you and our delivery partners. Since then, we've communicated various product changes and withdrawals critical in enabling this move and worked with you on a few key pieces of work.

We're about to enter a scaled delivery phase of the programme, during which we will eventually migrate all services off the REN network. Working through our delivery plans, we've identified some key end-customer and RSP pain points we aim to solve. We will need your support in some areas to complete the REN to FAN transition work in time.

Planned upgrade outage experience

In early 2023, we had a challenging time dealing with the magnitude of critical upgrades and long-duration outages across planned bitstream upgrades - sometimes as long as 50 minutes for an outage. We acknowledge that this was a challenge for you and your customers.

Since then, our teams have worked hard to improve systems and processes to reduce outage cutover times as much as possible, reducing the customer impact and improving the overall experience. We're pleased to share that, on average, across Bitstream services, most outages are now five minutes or less, a vast improvement from the worst-case scenarios early last year.

New Small Business Fibre pre-business hour slot (6am-9am)

With the volume of planned upgrades we were dealing with across REN end-of-life and BAU provisioning, some upgrades and outages had to be moved to daytime windows. We understand this created challenges for your customers – specifically across Small Business Fibre.

During this time, the most frequently asked request (when night work was not possible), was a non-business hours slot for outages, which allowed for scheduling of your tech services before or after that slot.  

From 1 April 2024, we plan to implement a new pre-business hour slot (between 6am and 9am) each day solely for planned upgrades across Bitstream Small Business Fibre products. Outages across Bitstream 3 and 3A will remain as overnight. This change will vastly enhance the customer experience and reduce outage times from improved systems and processes.

More consistency around advance notice

Analysis of our data showed there was scope to improve our advance planned outage notification processes. We found some Small Business customers were impacted in a few cases. We have learned from this, and a more consistent approach will be applied from 1 April 2024 where all planned outages will be provided with a minimum 5 business days’ notice.  

Daytime ISAM migrations

ISAM migrations are a critical part of the REN end-of-life programme. We plan to migrate all remaining ISAMs to FAN switches by the end of July 2025. We must complete the migrations in this timeframe to avoid significant outages of customer services running on the REN network.

While we have been steadily migrating these network elements over the last year, there isn’t enough time to complete all the remaining ISAM migrations overnight. We have considered various approaches to managing these planned ISAM outages. However, to enable the completion of all migrations by the end of July 2025, we need to complete some of these migrations during the day while maximising migrations we are already doing at night.

What does this mean for ISAM migrations?

• We will choose only low-impact ISAMs with 50 customers or less for daytime migrations.
• ISAMs with point-to-point business connections, for example, HSNS or HSNS Lite, will only be completed at night.
• We will give five business days' notice for these migrations.

Next steps and support

Overall, we hope these changes improve your customer experience and simplify dealing with REN-to-FAN-related outages in the future. We also appreciate your support in working through the ISAM migrations requiring daytime outages to mitigate more severe outages. 

We have created a section on our Service Provider (SP) website to provide you visibility on these projects. If you have any further questions or need additional support, don't hesitate to contact your account team.