Project: Notifying users of outages and remedial actions

Some outages are planned as part of scheduled maintenance. Network operators often advertise these outages by broadcast email sent to all of their end-users. For examples, see this file. Such emails are often of limited value to end-users because they may describe outages that don't affect an individual end-user (e.g. a network link that they don't use, or the outage may be at a time when they don't need the network) and because they must be manually processed to determine which are relevant to a specific end-user, and which are not. It would also be useful for network operators to be able to advertise to their end-users known current outages, and what remedial action is being taken, so as to reduce the number of queries from end-users.

The goal of this project is to develop a form (possibly in XML) for describing network outages, and software to allow operators to distribute such forms, and for end-users to filter out irrelevant forms and even maintain a database of anticipated outages, which can be referred to when trying to explain observed outages.

To promote end-user adoption of the software, it could also be used to advertise other events, such as road traffic conditions (e.g. see this link) of interest to the end-user.

This could be extended to form a peer-to-peer system in which end-users share their knowledge of service (un)availability, and of which abnormal events have been reported or are being rectified.

Examples of notices about various services: Telcos: Telstra, Optus phone, Grangenet; Infrastructure (e.g. electricity supply) at UNSW; Sydney roads

Products

2004 2005