Plusnet: Troubles with Traffic Management System

 

2 days ago I mentioned Plusnet's (UK) traffic management policies, providing advanced application-based tiering (here) - and today I saw that the operator has experienced some issues with the DPI system used to implement it (from Ellacoya-Arbor Networks - see "U.K. Provider PlusNet Addresses Network Management With Tiered Services and Transparency" - here)

Bob Pullen, from Plusnet's Customer Support, writes to his customers about "..the problems we've been experiencing with our traffic management platform. Because of these problems, your Internet connection may not have been performing as well as you would normally expect."

See here. Needless to say (and may be irrelevant to Plusnet’s unfortunate problem), that like all critical network components, DPI and their management systems (policy servers, for example) need to have a well-thought redundancy design. One example (rather basic with partial redundancy) is shown in the following chart:

"Our network engineers have managed to partially restore service, and the traffic management platform is now processing requests again. Customers should be aware that there are certain cases where we will have to manually fix accounts. This particularly applies to customers who changed account type today or have recently entered/exited failed billing. We will be looking to fix these accounts tomorrow where necessary. We still need to swap out some hardware and restore resiliency to the platform so we're not completely out of the water yet."