On 03-20-19 20:57, Bj”rn Felten wrote to All <=-
Well, within 24 hours we will know how the transfer from one ISP to another have worked.
In Sweden we can chose whatever electricity provider we want. With
the switch from one to the other, we expect the changeover to be
totally smooth, so that we don't lose a single period of electricity.
And it works. The new provider simply issues a changeover to the old provider and the change is done instantly.
In that case, all that has to be done is for billing information to be transferred across. There is no changed required for generation, transmission or metering. All that stays the same, which is one reason why I find electricity privitisation a little bizarre - you simply get to choose who sends the bill. :) And it doesn't always work. I know of cases where the old provider wouldn't release the account and the customer ended up getting double billed (a bill from the old and new provider).
Why it can't work the same for fiber is beyond me. Here the ISPs all have a 30 day notice. I had to ask my old ISP to cancel my account and then inform my new ISP when, after 30 days, the cancellation was going
to take place, and then hope that my new ISP will be ready to take
over. After a minute, an hour or half a day depending on how alert they are.
There's a lot more changes. You are connecting to a different back end network, so it's a case of effectively disconnecting from one network and reconnecting to another. But that said, the system in Sweden seems overly complicated. In Australia, all you do is sign up for a new provider, and that starts a "churn" process, where the connection change is done in the background. The changover usually takes less than a week, and normally requires no intervention from the costomer, other than swapping or reconfiguring their router.
If you have VoIP only phones and no email access, it's kinda hard to reach the helpdesk of your new ISP to inform them that it's a go to connect me via their service...
Here, it's normally a simply matter of when it stops working, switch to the new service, which will start working very quickly, if not immediately. But if something goes wrong, that's what mobile phones are for.
Normally such a churn works fine, helped a friend with this process a few months ago and it went smoothly - I helped with the "paperwork" (actually electronic), then the new provider delivered the router. When his connection with the old provider died, I simply swapped the router and he was up and running on the new one. :)
Changing connection technologies is sometimes more complicated. The last technology change was from ADSL to VDSL almost 2 years ago. I stayed with the same provider (I like them), but the process was officially a change of plan, but in practice was more like a change of provider, because the same line was to be switched from the ADSL DSLAM at the exchange to the VDSL node across the street.
All the paperwork looked normal, but when the ADSL went down, the VDSL didn't come up. And of course, this was all discovered on a FRiday evening, which meant nothing would be done over the weekend.
In the middle of the next week, a tech from the NBN (the owner of the VDSL network) came to investigate. Turns out that the tech who did the changeover trusted the cabling data in the pillar and didn't check to see that he had the right pair. The old connection only died when the port was disconnected at the enchange. It only took a few minutes with a signal tracer for him to locate the right pair and fix the connection in the street to get us back online. :)
... <A>bort <R>etry <D>o what I mean!!!
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