Service outage on 3/18, you maybe impacted, hopefully for just 20 minutes, non event

On 3/18, starting at 11PM, running till 5AM, KPUD has a maintenance window to work on their fiber backbone. We anticipate the outage to only be 20 minutes, not the full 6 hours. KPUD is adding a “splice point”, which is an access port to their backbone at the north end of Bainbridge Island. This portion of the backbone was built over 15 years ago and has very limited/difficult accessibility. The new access point allows KPUD to start building to communities at the far north east corner of Bainbridge where there is currently no possibility of service. Net253 is working with KPUD and the Bloedel Reserve to bring them into the 21st century. The equipment we are replacing at the Reserve is branded “American Telegraph”. That is the predecessor to a company you may be familiar with, “American Telegraph and Telephone (AT&T)”.

You might wonder “what’s up, why would this interrupt everything on Bainbridge and take down Net253? “ Fair question. We have been working with KPUD for “loop redundancy” for over two years and a construction plan has finally been determined. We will have a geographically diverse route, where we hop on a submarine fiber from South Bainbridge to Bremerton to form a giant loop around Kitsap county. This high bandwidth link will greatly improve the reliability of the entire KPUD network throughout the county.

Please recognize that the incumbents (CenturyLink/Comcast) have had their primary backbone in place for 100+ and 40+ years. KPUD is at about 15 years for their initial backbone construction. They are a growing network and will have occasional hiccups. These hiccups will significantly drop after the “great circle” is constructed.

Please on 3/18, do not call/text/email us until after 3/19 6am, and only if your internet is still down. Please check our website to see if there is an announcement indicating there is still a problem.

Looking forward to 5:01am on 3/19 when this particular blip is behind us!

1:30AM Update - no disruption yet. KPUD performed a mid span splice, which is extra difficult, to avoid taking us down.

3/19 Update - KPUD completed the work with zero seconds of interruption of service. Thanks guys!