C'mon Ben, banks all-time at caba ATM? ;)

Ha!

Actually, just got a call from Telstra then (8pm!). Told me to ignore the last message, they can’t get there until Tuesday April 2nd. 

Eh? Message received last night: now Caba is due to be fixed by 7pm Wednesday. What's another day between friends?
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And.. Cabarita is back.

Manly surfcam has been offline all day today - according to our network provider, "an NBN fibre cable has been damaged by third party boring near the Chatswood exchange. We are unable to provide us with an estimated time of resolution at this stage."

Manly update: "The supplier has confirmed that the new cable has arrived at the site of the damage. The supplier may need traffic management engagement since the site is located on a major road. The supplier is unable to provide us with an estimated time of resolution at this stage."

Manly is back!

Argh! Cabarita is offline again.

As you can see from our monitoring trace (that's a two-hour snapshop below, from about 1:10am last night), everything was fine until about 1:36am, when it went offline for eight minutes. It then came back/dropped out another ten times until 3:06am, which is the last we've heard of it.

I suspect it's the same issue as before - Telstra related (and not our equipment) - but unfortunately the process to ascertain the problem is arduous (see above!). I'll try my best to get it back up and running ASAP.
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And.. Caba is back again (for now!). Must have been a Telstra exchange issue.. though I haven't yet had time to lodge a fault.

So, I'm expecting it to go down again.

Standby in 3, 2, 1....

Caba is offline again. Let’s wait and see if it comes back before dawn.

And Caba is back.

Hey Ben. Any word on the Bondi cam? It's the only south-facing cam between Cronulla and Avoca and a useful indicator for a number of breaks. Been down for yonks.

Yep, it's taken way longer than expected but we've got verbal agreement for a new location, so we're just finalising the paperwork before we hook up the data lines. It's a massive improvement from our old Bondi surfcam too.

good news - thanks mate

Caba went offline at 5:12am. 

Here we go again!

And... Caba is back.

We're still experiencing occasional surfcam outages at Cabarita, all of which are Telstra related and therefore out of our control.

Specifically, we seem to lose connectivity most mornings for a couple of hours, and then the service returns and runs fine for the rest of the day. I've got no idea what it is but I'll continue to follow up with Telstra to see if they can pinpoint the problem.

As for NBN - the estimated date for the entire suburb to upgrade keeps getting pushed back - the NBN website now says that it's "Planned to be available from Jul-Sep 2019". However, it was meant to be live 18 months ago, so there's no way to know if this date will be pushed back again once we reach July.

Thanks for your patience, and apologies for the inconvenience. 

Hmmm, the surfcam came back just a few minutes after I posted above. 

Very odd. 

Speeds are very low too, so surfcam stream quality isn't great, but I'll give the equipment a reboot to see if that helps.

OK, that's a little better. Fingers crossed it remains stable.

Surprised to see Caba still online this morning (it's gone down just before dawn, every morning for the last week), but it's barely hanging in there - internet speeds are terrible.

Thought I'd share a graph showing how the streaming speeds were fine until about 5:25am, when they started to drop (this is normally about the time it switches off completely).

I managed to log into the router - only just - to reboot it (took three minutes to authenticate!) but it hasn't fixed the problem. Therefore the vision is slow and jerky this morning.

As it does every day, speeds will probably improve around 8-9am onwards. Again, this is a Telstra problem - the Cabarita region is about to roll over to NBN soon, so I get the feeling it'll be hard to get Telstra to fix their ageing ADSL infrastructure in a timely manner.

Bugger. Now it's gone completely offline.

We're back up to an acceptable surfcam stream at Caba now. As per the graph below, internet speeds came back up on their own accord around 6:50am (after being offline since about 6am).

Looks to me that it could be local network congestion - everyone in the suburb waking up around that time and using the internet for a few minutes each, but bringing everyone's speeds to a crawl because of the lack of bandwidth to the exchange. The stream is otherwise fine throughout the day because everyone is off at work. And by the time everyone gets home, the sun's down so the surfcam isn't being watched.

Hey guys just putting an idea out there, what about users potentially gaining access to surf cam footage of a particular day and timeframe?

We already offer access to replays for some surfcams (all remaining cams to come online soon) but we only hold five days of footage (because storage costs are considerable).

For example, Burleigh this AM: https://www.swellnet.com/surfcams/burleigh-heads/replays#/2019-05-08/44…

Was there something else you had in mind?

Caba's offline again this morning.

Though curiously, it went down in the early hours of the morning (speeds gradually slowed from about 1:20am) - which goes against the theory that it's related to congestion around sunrise when everyone wakes up and logs into Facebook and Netflix. Graph below is a 2-hour snapshot of speeds between 11:50pm and 1:50am last night.

I've already remotely power-cycled the equipment (and it hasn't come back up) so we'll just have to wait until Telstra's infrastructure fixes itself again (usually 7:30am onwards).

Online again, bang on 7:30 am.

Middleton cam been down since Saturday.

Haven't been able to get anyone to check it out (though have tried multiple channels).. sorry mate. Will have someone there ASAP.

any more word on the bondi cam ben?

Bondi'll be done soon as we knock off our Illawarra cams. NBN activations have been a nightmare for the last few months (including some upgrades of existing ADSL services).

No problem Ben....probably not much to see anyway lol. Just wanted to let u guys know.

Thanks MDM. We actually have a custom alert system that notifies us within seconds of there being a power outage, internet drop out etc. So we are always aware of what's going on - what we don't know is whether it's temporary, or a major issue.

Found out today there's an electrical issue at Middleton so we're gonna have to get the sparky around to fix it up.

Middleton went offline at 4:45am, Goolwa went offline five minutes ago. Both seem to be power related issues (not ISP) though SA Power Networks are not reporting any local problems (yet).

Middleton back, waiting for Goolwa. Still nothing on SA Power Networks website.

Goolwa is now back online.

Any chance the middleton cam can be pointed towards the point instead of the bay? There's a lot of days where the bay is flat but its surfable off the point.

Margaret river cam has not been working for me for a few weeks now. Is it just my end or what? Had a just a grey screen for a while now I get a still image but vid wont play.

Someone else had the same problem recently, turned it it was a slow internet connection at their end. Can you check your speed via Speedtest.net and let me know what you’re getting.

Portsea is back! 

https://www.swellnet.com/surfcams/portsea

Excellent now you can watch close outs in real time again!!

Sorry bone

Nice clear picture though

Finally found out why Lorne is offline... the surf club undergoing some major renovations. Should be back late Oct or early Nov.

Both Thirroul cams are back.

Wollongong is back!

Argh! Just spent a couple of weeks redoing the Byron surfcam(s) - had to fabricate a new mounting pole, because the house was renovated with a brand new roof - finally got everything back up and running, and yesterday's thunderstorms across the Northern Rivers seems to have knocked out some of the equipment. Not sure what the damage is (whether it's our gear, or the ISP's network) but we'll look into as a priority.

Here's a WTF moment - during yesterday's thunderstorms, one of our surfcam modems was bricked. Normally, they just stop working. Occasionally I've seen the data port fried. But... check out the plastic stuff that came out of the modem following yesterday's lightning strike! Never seen this before.

Couple of weeks ago a friends neighbour's rendered block wall was hit by lightning, showering the area with fence fragments up to 30 m away.
Both homes lost many electrical appliances.
Crazy.

Hey Ben, spewing about the Byron cams causing you headaches. I’ve got experience with POE cams (electrician) let me know if I can help getting them going for you.

Thanks mate - issue with Byron is the NBN connection. They haven't been able to fix it yet. Insanely frustrating. I've been down there maybe five times in the last 2 weeks to "try another modem" etc.. useless! 

There is an intermittent fault at the Byron fibre exchange causing signal to drop in and out rapidly, multiple faults per second which won’t get picked up using your average ping test. They have been trying to fix it for months. not sure if NBN have let that slip to you. I’ve got clients tearing their hair out over it. It only affects uploads like streaming etc, download speeds have been ok. Im just around the corner from the cams if you need a hand