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Archived NEST News

29th December 2009 Upgrade work will be carried out this week to our St Sampson hotspot to improve the technical performance of the wireless signal. There may therefore be some downtime while this is carried out.

28th December 2009 BT reports the new part as been fitted and indeed remote testing indicates that our City of London hotspot is now working again.

28th December 2009 British Telecom, the provider of the internet feed for our new City of London based hotspot has an outage. Equipment failed this morning, has not responded to a restart and the engineer onsite is now therefore awaiting a new part to arrive. We have been advised it is expected to be repaired later today.

23rd December 2009 The main server handling payments has been tested and is fully functional.

22nd December 2009 The problem with the payments handling server located in our data centre has been resolved. We are currently testing the system to ensure it is working correctly.

22nd December 2009 Our servers located at the data centre went down about 30 mins ago at 0830. We have raised a support ticket with them and will update this as we learn more. This will stop clients from making payments.

14th December 2009 We apologise for this afternoon's outage at the QE2, this was due to a third party system outside of our control. It has now been resolved.

20th November 2009 The radio card at our Vale site has now been changed and we have received reports from customers that it is now functioning even better than before.

13th November 2009 The part required to repair the Vale network has arrived, however due to the exceptionally poor weather conditions we have decided to delay the repair work until a suitable time.

10th November 2009 Cable & Wireless appear to have had a major internet/broadband problem today which resulted in one of our services and in excess of 2500 customers of Sure and Guernsey Net being without internet. By 1500hrs today some customers were back online. This has been a fault that was out of our control.

9th November 2009 The part required to repair the Vale network did not arrive, however in order to restore service the system is working on a temporary backup until the part does arrive. Therefore customers using the Vale system should not notice any ill effect.

6th November 2009 The NEST Wireless service serving the Vale area suffered a complete wireless radio failure. The card was replaced with another known good one, however, very soon after, this also promptly failed with a completely different problem! We are therefore currently operating with a backup system, until tomorrow when we will replace the faulty hardware.

3rd November 2009 Paypal systems still plaque us with problems. Despite our wishes to help our customers part with their money in return for our wireless internet service the Paypal service continues to intermittently fail. If that occurs then use the contact form on the welcome page to email us so that we are able to manually enter the details and send you a paypal request

8th September 2009 Yesterday evening the St Sampson and Vale service went off line at random periods. We don't know the reason and are currently looking into the stability of the connections.

1st September 2009 Despite our best efforts the Paypal payment system still plagues us with problems. Until such time as it is fully operational our advice is to use the contact form on the welcome page to email us so we may manually add time or create a new user account on your behalf.

10th August 2009 Although the original Paypal payment system problem which has affected us since July has been fixed, our detailed analysis of all Paypal transaction logs since then is still showing some payment confirmation timeouts from Paypal. Our belief is that this is most likely caused by a problem with our accounts server and it's internet connection. We therefore decided last week to build a new much faster server and to move it to our Data Centre where it will be connected to a dedicated 100MB/s line. If further testing this week continues to prove successful, we will switch over to the new server later this week.

3rd August 2009 Added a contact form so that if users are having problems, you can email us directly from the error page without having to find yet another wireless connection to send the email through!

30th July 2009 We have resolved all of the Paypal problems except one. We have discovered that Paypal have recently made changes to their internal security checks that are made on the Credit card details entered when making a payment. Occasionally we have found that certain cards will fail. On some occasions we have found a payment works and is successful, yet when the customer tries again a few hours or days later, it fails with the error "The card you entered cannot be used for this payment. Please enter a different credit or debit card number." We are unable to resolve these problems directly as it Paypal which is choosing to reject a particular card or not. We are in discussions with Paypal and will try to find a resolution as soon as possible.

27th July 2009 Grateful thanks to those customers who have provided feedback recently on the problem with returning to the hotspot login page after making a payment. As a result of the information that has been provided, we have been able to identify further changes that were made by PayPal without our knowledge. The return page now functions again however further testing will be carried out during the coming week to ensure this has been resolved.

20th July 2009 Further modifications were made to the Paypal payment system by Nest today and following testing we believe all is functioning correctly. Feedback welcome by email to nest@guernsey.net

18th July 2009 Tests have concluded that Paypal have added some advertising cookies to their main login page from Omniture. Unless their cookies are allowed through, Paypal login fails! We have made changes to the hotspot to allow for this change within Paypal. We can only apologise to all our customers but this change was outside of our control as we were not notified by Paypal of this significant change to their website functionality. It is quite possible that Paypal has made further changes that we are currently unaware of, therefore further testing will be carried out over the weekend.

17th July 2009 It has been reported that some customers are having difficulties making payments through PayPal. Naturally, we are investigating this problem with urgency.

13th July 2009 Nigerian fraudsters (i.e. The '419 Scam') are targeting Guernsey based email addresses with fake emails claiming to have been sent from Newtel and Sure. These emails have not been genuinely sent from these two organizations. Likewise, if you receive an email from us, we will always address you in person and not with a generic opening phrase such as 'Dear Customer'. We also use a spell checker, so if the email is full of grammar and spelling errors, this is also a good sign that it is not a genuine email!

13th July 2009 Engineers have found the cause of the problem and have resolved the issue with a reboot! We are now making plans to replace this server with a new one which is NOT based on Windows.

13th July 2009 One of our central Servers has a fault. Users should not notice any difference to their service as the system has automatically switched over to a backup system.

3rd July 2009 Email problems resolved. Not all the information to changes to the email system by our ISP had been passed on to us. After some research we have identified the error and corrected it.

1st July 2009 Our ISP made some changes to how the outgoing email works via SMTP, we have now made appropriate changes to our system to allow outgoing emails to work again. Emails leaving our ISP and bound for external addresses off island appears to be still unresolved and outside of our control. We are still conducting tests to identify exactly where the problem lies.

1st July 2009 Sending email out of the island seems to have problems. Mail within the island appears all OK. We suspect an ISP mail server problem which is out of our control.

22nd June 2009 The internet died this evening for a couple of hours. The fault was not with us and we continue to investigate the reason which was out of our control but suspect it was with one of the ISPs.

16th June 2009 Login difficulties for the St Sampson service have been reported which were solved this afternoon at approximately 1630.

1st June 2009 Unavailable web site errors appears to be solved. We believe this was a connection to the outside world glitch by our supplier.

27th May 2009 We are receiving reports that some web sites are unavailable. There are no problems with the Nest system. We shall continue to monitor the situation and if we have an answer then it will be posted here

12th May 2009 News from Cable & Wireless (Sure)

Some customers may experience difficulty connecting to the broadband service for between five and ten minutes on Tuesday 12th May 2009 at 6am. This is due to essential maintenance work being carried out to upgrade the current gateway. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause. We endeavour to carry out maintenance during times of perceived low usage to minimise any disruption.

9th May 2009 We apologise for lack of access into our wireless network today. Our main central Windows server crashed. We have re-started the server and given it a serious talking too. All is now working fine again.

5th May 2009 Sure Broadband have just informed us of some work they will be carrying out on the 14th May which will necessitate the internet being down at 6am for about 10 minutes. Some of our sites are connected via Sure and therefore this will affect those sites.

14th April 2009 The work required to change over to using Paypal for creating and topping up accounts was completed today.

9th April 2009 After successful testing of a Paypal payment system at St Sampson, the QE2 and Salerie Wireless Hotspots will shortly be upgraded to allow payments for access via Paypal. There will therefore be some downtime while equipment is upgraded during office hours. We hope this disruption will be minimal.

27th February 2009 Power failure in the QE2 marina area took out the Nest Wireless system for QE2 and Salerie for part of the day. Service restored in full, by evening following work by Guernsey Electricity. Our apologies for the disruption.

26th February 2009 Paypal for QE2 and Salerie is coming soon. Keep watching this space for details of start date.

4th February 2009 Second wireless connection added to the St Sampson system serving The Bridge area. Paypal is also available on this network.

3rd January 2009 St Sampson can accept the automatic PayPal system to sign up for and use the Wireless Internet service.

1st January 2009 Happy New Year to all our customers!

1st January 2009 Testing of the ability to pay for a Nest Wireless account via PayPal is currently undergoing final verification tests. This service will initially be used to provide existing and potential customers with the ability to payfor a wireless connection via PayPal instead of having to send us a cheque. We are hoping that this additional facility will provide a useful enhancement to our services by making it much simpler and more convenient to connect via our wireless service.

We will post more news when it goes live shortly!

11th November 2008 Jersey rally replay has finshed, but keep checking for other interesting GPRS/GPS tracking demos

6th November 2008 Jersey rally replay currently on show here

7th October 2008 Sure, Digimap and Links Communications join forces to provide vehicle tracking for the Jersey Rally 2008, 10/11th October. Watch the rally car speeds and location live by clicking on one of the sites shown on the Nest home page.

2nd October 2008 The new Nest Salerie service is currently undergoing tests. This will serve the Salerie and Les Banques area of St Peter Port.

30th September 2008 St Sampson service is currently off line due to a power failure in the UK affecting the main server. It is hoped that the mains will be restored by the weekend

25th September 2008 A fault with one of the wireless cards has been detected and that unit replaced. Service is now back to normal

23rd September 2008 The QE2 Nest service is currently undergoing some modifications and upgrades. As such the service will be down for the odd hour or day over the next two weeks

14th September 2008 St Sampson Nest service has been upgraded and is now fully operational as a pay to use facility

3rd September 2008 A programming error with the St Sampson service indicated that Paypal payment and automatic activation was in place and operating. This system was under test and should not have been made available to the general public until such time as it was fully working. It is hoped that such a service will become available in the future thus allowing short term logins and credit card payments. The same facility is likely to be included in the QE2 service.

1st September 2008 Links Communications, Digimap and Sure combine their talents to design and install a unique powerboat tracking system for the Guernsey UIM World class 3c Offshore Powerboat championship details here

23rd July 2008 Guernsey Net are due to upgrade their service which will involve a disconnection for most customers between 0530 and 0630.

22nd July 2008 Cable & Wireless(Sure) internet service and email service is down for the afternoon.

30th June 2008 Links Communications, Nest Wireless, Airtel and BBC Guernsey combine their communications skills and facilities to enable the first Channel Island school radio station to broadcast.

The station operates on 87.7Fm and is on air from 30th June until 3rd July

5th June 2008 Guernsey Net had an overnight fault that prevented their spam filters from operating and thereby allowing many thousands of unwanted mail to go through their system. They are working hard to rectify the situation.

22nd May 2008 The internet upgrade by C&W has been completed.

13th May 2008 Cable and Wireless have started to roll out their improved internet service, click here for more details. Nest would be interested to hear of your experiences before, during and after this upgrade, please email us

Tuesday 8th April 2008 Nest St Sampson currently has no connection to the outside world. Whilst the hotspot is transmitting the identity of NEST St Sampson and you are able to connect by wireless you will be unable to browse the internet or send and receive emails. We are looking into the problem.

Monday 7th April 2008 Cable and Wireless continue to work on their upgraded service. They have not given a launch date.

Friday 28th March 2008 We have received notification that as a result of "ongoing problems" within C&W's network, Cable and Wireless are upgrading their core network software which will result in all ADSL connections being disconnected at 5am on Friday 28th March. C&W are hoping that this will resolve the problems that customers have been having as a result of the ongoing work that they are carrying out in the Exchanges to upgrade all customers from 1MB/s to 2MB/s.
Despite extensive testing, Nest Wireless have not been able to find any problem with our ADSL equipment at St Sampson. We now feel that the recent unreliability of the internet connection may actually be related to Cable and Wireless's reference to these "ongoing problems".

Thursday 20th March 2008 We apologise to customers who are trying to use St Sampson Nest Wireless and finding that it is frequently available as a strong wireless signal but not providing any internet access. We have observed that ever since C&W announced they were upgrading all exchanges to 2MB/s ADSL provision, St Sampson Nest Wireless's ADSL line has been frequently dropping out during the night and at weekends. This may just be a coincidence and we are therefore conducting our own investigations into these regular outages in case there is a problem at 'our end'. So far we have not found anything wrong with our equipment and also the phone line has been tested and found to be OK. We have raised these frequent 'out of hours' disconnect problems with C&W but they have stated that they haven't changed anything at their end at all (!) so it can't be them. We again apologise for the unreliable performance of St Sampson Nest Wireless and will hopefully have a resolution to this as soon as possible.

Wednesday 12th March 2008 Announcement from Cable & Wireless
In relation to the Cable and Wireless Broad Band network, please be aware that Emergency Planned Works is required for 05:00 Thursday 13th March. The expected duration of outage will be no more than 30 minutes but will effect all ISP Broad Band customers, however we believe that there will be minimal disruption.

Thursday 6th March 2008 The following proposed Cable and Wireless Maintenance has now been moved to as yet unknown future date.


Announcement from Cable & Wireless
March 6th, 7th and 11th 2008

Please be advised that Cable and Wireless will be carrying out necessary planned maintenance in Guernsey on the above dates.
This work is in preparation for the integration and uplift of our Broadband Service scheduled for the end of March.
The scheduled start time for these planned works is 05.00 finishing at 06.00

Wednesday 5th march 2008: A power cut in certain parts of St Peter Port may have affected the Nest Wireless Internet service. The power was off from around 1930hrs and restored at about 2330hrs.

Friday 29th February 2008: The works undertaken by Cable & Wireless to solve their ongoing internet problem did not succeed. They have attempted another software upgrade this morning which necessitated a break in service.

Thursday 28th February 2008
Announcement from Cable & Wireless

"We (Cable and Wireless) have identified an issue which adversely affects user performance in some circumstances over a period of time. C&W is working with its suppliers to overcome this issue, and the recommendation is for us to implement a software upgrade on the affected equipment which is expected to solve the issue. Unfortunately this necessitates a brief break in service while the new software is brought into service. C&W proposes to undertake this work at 5am on Thursday 28th Feb, in order to minimise the disruption to end users. We regret the short notice for this work, but as it is a service-impacting issue, we do not wish to adversely affect users service, or impact the project timelines through waiting for the full notice period and therefore are treating this upgrade as an emergency PEW. Cable and Wireless Core Network Engineering will be activating a temporary disconnection of Broadband customers across all Exchange areas, this maintenance should cause less than 10 minutes of lack of service to those customers effected. Core Engineering intends to disconnect customers in a manner that should cause no requirement from the ISPs to re-boot their RADIUS servers. However an early diagnostic view of the status of your customers at the start of business on Thursday morning would be recommended."

Wednesday 27th February 2008: Planned works by Cable and Wireless took place this morning at the Admiral Park exchange. Internet services were lost for approximately 45 minute.

Friday 22nd February 2008: The QE2 Marina and the Salerie service both were out of service from 0528 and again at 0958 this morning, connection to the GuernseyNet network was lost.

This is the announcement from Guernsey Net.
"Due to an unforeseen hardware fault Cable and Wireless Core Network Engineering will be activating a temporary disconnection of Broadband customers across all exchange areas.
This work will take place at 05.00 hours on Friday 22nd."

Monday 4th February 2008: A number of upgrades are currently being undertaken on the NEST St Sampson site, as such the system will be off air intermittently for the next few days

Wednesday 30th January 2008: Planned works by Guernsey Net took take place overnight , this has left a number of users without Internet facilities. Tests conducted on the Nest network suggest all is now OK, should that not be the case we welcome reports by email to nest@guernsey.net

Sunday 20th January 2008: "NEST St Sampson" is currently offline due to maintenance. We expect the work to be finished by Monday 21st January 2008.

Wednesday 2nd January 2008: Although "NEST St Sampson" has been working solidly for a long time, it decided to take itself offline at some point over the New Year Holiday. We apologies for this loss of service and have dealt with the problem. All now appears fine again, but please contact us if there are any further problems accessing the wireless hotspot in St Sampson.

Thursday 15th November 2007: Cable and Wireless have had problems with connections to the outside world that has affected the Nest network.

Friday 2nd November 2007: The SSID for the QE2 marina site has been change from QE2Nest to NEST QE2. The operation of the site is as before, this change is to bring together a common style for Nest hotspots so the Nest name comes first then the name of the area covered.

Thursday 25th October 2007: Further work is planned by Cable and Wireless to their network on 9th and 10th November that may reduce capacity of off island links.

Saturday 22nd September 2007: Works planned by Cable and Wireless to their new link with the UK may reduce capacity to the outside world.

Tuesday 18th September 2007: St Sampson Nest without welcome screen whilst system is updated.

Thursday 13th September 2007: The Cable and Wireless proposed work for the 12th has been delayed until this weekend 15/16 September

Wednesday 12th September 2007: St Sampson Nest service out of action for a short period.

Tuesday 11th September 2007: Cable and Wireless will be working on their systems tomorrow (Wednesday 12th), the works will not affect the Nest wireless side locally but may reduce the capacity and speed of connections outside of the island.

Friday 31st August 2007: Cable and Wireless problems appear to have been resolved and we are now seeing good and stable upload and download speeds.

Tuesday 28th August 2007: The Cable and Wireless central exchange problems continue on an intermittent basis

Tuesday 21st August 2007: A number of our customers in Guernsey may be experiencing problems with connectivity to the outside world, this is due to a fault at Cable and Wireless central exchange.

Friday 3rd August 2007:
St Sampsons Nest:
The new NEST Wireless Internet Hotspot for the St Sampsons area is now using the same equipment as we have used at the QE2 marina (although we have decided to try a different internet supplier than that used for the QE2 hotspot). Although this service is now protected by the same login system as that used by QE2 Nest, we have enabled a trial period that lasts for a day, which is reset every day. This free service will last for only a limited period of time. Feedback is much appreciated. Please send them to our usual email address. nest@guernsey.net. This system is still under trial and we cannot guarantee 24/7 operation as we are still tinkering with the system to fine tune it. (Another reason why it's free!)
QE2 Nest: Further tests at the QE2 Hotspot has clearly shown to our satisfaction that the slow internet problems which have dogged this system over the last few months is 100% due to 'contention' on the ADSL line. This is something which is completely beyond our control. We have seen speeds varying, minute to minute, between 200kbps and 900kbps. However the running average is never faster than 400-500kbps. We assure you that this slow internet speed is not something we are happy with and although we are still gathering more data, we will make a decision shortly that if our current supplier cannot resolve this on a long term basis, we will consider moving our account to an alternative provision method or even a completely different supplier.

Monday 30th July 2007: New Wireless Internet hotspot added to the Nest network serving the St Sampson Bridge area and marina. Free access during the trial period, connect to the SSID 'NEST St Sampson'. Comments on performance is most welcome by email to: nest@guernsey.net.

1600hrs Tuesday 17th July 2007: The Nest number one engineer has fixed the problem. Fingers well crossed that everything remains stable from now on.

Tuesday 17th July 2007: Intermittent problems continue to plague the QE2 Nest system. Engineers are working on the problem as this is typed.

Tuesday 10th July 2007: Following a complete rebuild of the equipment serving the QE2 marina, the system is now back up and running as before. Reports on the performance are invited by email only please to: nest@guernsey.net

Wednesday 27th June 2007: A slight glitch has been noted on the temporary QE2 Nest system which was rectified this afternoon. The main system that went out of action last Sunday is being rebuilt and following testing should be up and running by the next weekend.

Monday 25th June 2007: The Nest backup system has been installed and activated which will allow customers continued use of the network.

1800hrs Sunday 24th June 2007: Despite the best efforts of our engineers over the weekend the login system remains out of action, in the interim a temporary system will be installed so Nest users will still be able to access and use the network as normal with the exception that no login details will be required. Work will continue next week to solve the problem so some outages will be experienced until we are sure everything is stable.

Sunday 24th June 2007: Unfortunately the Nest system is still down and users are unable to login. Engineers will be working on this all day, serves us right for doing an upgrade on Tuesday! !

Saturday 23rd June 2007: It transpires that yesterday's problem is still ongoing. Our engineers are currently working on this and we apologies for the system being unavailable at the moment.

Friday 22th June 2007: We were notified earlier today that the QE2 Nest system has been running very slow for certain customers. After a lengthy analysis we believe we have identified the cause and rolled out a fix for this at 9pm. All customers will need to disconnect from the QE2Nest wireless system and then reconnect to return to normal service. If on re-connection you still have a slow connection, please contact us so that we can re-investigate.

Tuesday 19th June 2007: QE2 Nest will be down during the afternoon for an upgrade. During this period the service will be unavailable and there may also be outages over the next three days for short durations.

Friday 1st June 2007: Midland neptune DSC marine radio now on special offer with free GPS receiver worth £80.

Thursday 17th May 2007: Carteret and Dielette marinas due to have their own wireless internet service this summer operated by the marina owners.

Sunday 13th May 2007: Guernsey Net email server briefly down, may also affect C&W users - reason unknown.

Thursday 10th May 2007: Guernsey Net email server briefly down, reason unknown.

Saturday 5th May 2007: French marina and harbour tide site added to useful sites list. Most French ports and Channel Islands listed with excellent tidal data.

Tuesday 1st May 2007: One off 10 minute free trial period introduced for potential customers to test the system.

Monday 16th April 2007: Access to Internet down over lunchtime for up to an hour, reason not yet known but may be due to Guernsey Net upgrade.

Sunday, 15th April 2007: Upgrading by Newtel of their network with the connections to the outside world being down overnight.

Wednesday, 11th April 2007: Internet operating slowly especially sites that are not Guernsey based. Problem unknown but is not within the Nest Wireless system.

Thursday, 15th March 2007: Internet down during the early hours of the day whilst Guernsey Net perform an upgrade.

Monday, 26th to Wednesday, 28th February 2007: Problems with email and the internet following an upgrade by Guernsey Net.

Friday, 23rd February 2007: Web sites hosted out of island difficult to access.

Saturday, 17th February 2007: Password access introduced on the QE2Nest site along with an annual fee of £60.

Saturday, 11th November 2006: Power cut affects certain areas of the island and is restored by 1am.

Monday, 13th November 2006: Links Communications is currently selling the Midland Neptune DSC marine radio at a special offer price of £150. More information. Reports of intermittent problems with QE2NestAP2. This unit is primarily for the shop which is closed over the winter period. Research is being conducted to solve this problem for the summer. Meanwhile the Cisco powered main AP QE2Nest is unaffected and continues to offer the marina wireless internet service.

Monday, 25th September 2006: Connection to outside world down for certain users through fault with Cable and Wireless network.

Saturday, 16th September 2006: UPS added to remove or reduce problems caused by power cuts.

Tuesday, 12th September 2006: Following power cut system fixed and up and running.

Sunday, 10th September 2006: System down following a fault created by Guernsey Electricity power cut. Will be up and running again when additional equipment arrives in island.

Sunday, 3rd September 2006: Web site launches.