[Hands0n]

Anyone who has used Vodafone mobile broadband for any length of time will know that there can be serious connection problems from time to time. These are caused by their DNS being, lets be kind, a bit cranky at best and downright beligerant at worst. This manifests itself as very degraded service, with pages either not connecting or being incomplete where off-site content requires further DNS lookups by the browser to get the content being referred to.

The solution has been for such afflicted customers to set their handsets or netbooks/PCs to use the likes of OpenDNS, which works superbly well.

However, Vodafone have been working towards resolving the issues - it has only taken them over a year to get where they are today, which is still not as far as they should be. It is very obvious to anyone involved in networking, ever, that Vodafone do [or did] not regard their mobile data/broadband with any degree of seriousness or they would have resolved something as easy as flaky DNS within weeks at the longest, not years!

Anyway - the following is culled from the Vodafone customer forum, it is encouraging, somewhat.


Hi guys,

Just to let you know, we are aware of the cause of this issue. We are experiencing problems with an old server which handles 25% of customers internet traffic. The old system on this server has meant we've been unable to upgrade it in line with our other improvements, but we can't take it offline without it having a big impact on the rest of our network - so at the moment we're continuing to improve the capacity of our other servers before we take this one offline.

At the moment this means that during peak hours, you may experience degraded service - however, if you disconnect and reconnect to the internet, in order to acquire a new IP address, you have a 75% chance of landing on one of our unaffected servers.

We are working to address this as quickly as possible.

Thanks for your understanding :)

Jon

eForum Team

URL: http://forum.vodafone.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=1542&view=getnewpost



So now you know :)

[Ben]

It's sad when companies get so big that they lose their agility.

If it really is just one server then it's likely that throwing some money at the problem would fix it.

[Hands0n]

I think it is astonishingly bad management of their resources. Whoever is their network services manager should be given a mop and retired to the front lobby. He or she is not worthy of running their networks team.

Replacing DNS servers, if that is what is required, is a complete no brainer. It is basic stuff that any network group should be able to manage.

In terms of cost it is also very cheap to do. They are running four, so it says, although given the size of their network one has to wonder why! What are these? Intel i486/66 running Linux? For goodness sake, even if all else failed they could nip out onto the Internet and purchase a "DNS Appliance" which would save themselves all the trouble of building one. Here Vodafone, here's a starter for ten --> The DNS Appliance Imperative (http://member.dnsstuff.com/rc/images/taskzone/infoblox_pdfs/wp_dns_imperative.pdf).

Keep the change ;)