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We will be migrating a few pieces of our network core to a much larger battery backup system on the morning of October 24th 2017, between 09:30 and 10:30. The outage should only last 3-5 minutes but it is possible if there are problems that it could last a short while longer.
This upgrade will enable key parts of our core network to continue running for several days without mains power.
Hello All,
We will be doing additional recabling at the Dixon tower site on October 3rd from 9:00 AM through to 4:00 PM. During this time, brief disconnections in service will take place as we update the cables.
On October 4th, clients located in Ohkay Owingeh and Alcalde areas who are connected to the Black Mesa tower site will experience a brief outage as we swap to a new access point radio configuration. This outage will occur between 9:00 AM and 12:00 PM.
Also on October 4th, clients in the El Bosque area will experience a brief outage as we swap a piece of critical infrastructure. This outage should occur between 12:00 PM and 2:00 PM.
Thank you all for your patience and understanding.
--Steve
It appears the rain has found more damaged cables in the phone lines supplying our office. This also affects customers with 505-852-51** numbers. We have opened a ticket with the phone company and are still working to get them to move our phone service to our fiber optic line.
In the mean time you can call our 844-544-9499 number for the main line, 575-613-1133 for Brock, and 575-613-7711 for Steve.
The replacement backhaul radio for the High School water tank arrived early, so we will be replacing it this morning. Estimated downtime is about 5 minutes, starting around 09:30.
The radio link to the HS tank tower was replaced a few weeks ago, and it appears the brand-new hardware is failing. We have been working with the manufacturer over the past week to resolve the issue but it appears none of their solutions have worked.
We already ordered a replacement this past week in case the issue could not be resolved. Shipment tracking is showing the replacement should be delivered by Tuesday afternoon with installation then or first thing Wednesday.
If the situation worsens before then we may be able to pull a radio from another location temporarily to replace it.
We apologize for this interruption in service, and will be keeping a spare radio of this model on hand in the future.
We are seeing a lot of customers lose connections around Española Thurday evening, September 14th, in what appears to be a large power outage. At the moment the Jemez Co-op outage map is not loading.
UPDATE: At this point all of our equipment on mains power in the Española area has run down its battery backups and our network is out south of the Oñate center. We are monitoring the situation and will ensure the equipment comes back up properly when power is restored.
We will be doing some recabling at the Dixon tower site tomorrow, September 13th starting at 9am, which will result in brief (2-5 minutes) outages as each access point is connected with a new cable. This will affect customers in Dixon, Riconada, and Embudo.
We will be testing a significant hardware upgrade for the equipment that serves some customers connected to the Black Mesa tower (located near Hernandez) tomorrow, September 13th.
There will be a brief interruption in service around 5AM as settings are changed, followed by a few longer interruptions in service (5-10 minutes) beginning at 9AM. This should affect mostly customers located in Alcalde near Ohkay Owingeh and the Onate center.
If this test is successful we should be able to substantially improve service from this and other towers over the next few months. If it is not, we will reverse the changes and test equipment from another vendor.
Thank you for your patience as we work to upgrade the network. You can reach us with questions at https://bmwl.co/contact/.
It appears when the storms passed through this afternoon (Sunday 8/27) the power in Dixon went out, followed by eventual run-down of our battery backups on the equipment in Dixon.
We are working to find out more and haven't yet got an estimate on time to restore service.
We were notified today that all of REDI Net from Cuyamungue north has been cut off due to a truck taking down a pole with REDI Net fiber.
While there may be some changes in routing, our second fiber line / upstream ISP is carrying our customer traffic and access to the Internet should not be affected for our users.
Adding this second fiber line took a good deal of effort and expense, but we wanted a backup, and this is why.
We will be performing remote reconfiguration between 4-5am on Sunday 8/13 on the High School water tank in Espanola. This may result in 5-15 minutes of downtime for a subset of users.
We will be performing radio upgrades and realignments on Tuesday afternoon, weather permitting, which will result in several brief outages and periods of below-normal throughput as radios are replaced and reaimed. These changes should substantially improve performance for some users. Users in central and Eastern Española, as well as the Sombrillo/Dreamcatcher area may be affected.
UPDATED: T1 line is down again affecting phone service
We are having intermittent drop-outs with our T1 line today, this will affect customers trying to call our 505-852-**** numbers, and customers with VoIP lines with 505-852-**** phone numbers. Outgoing calls will work, but incoming calls may get an intermittent busy signal.
We have a ticket open with the phone company and they are working to remedy this. We are also exploring moving the phone service to our secondary fiber line for better reliability in the future.
For now please use the 844-544-9499 number to reach us.
Black Mesa Wireless started due to the presence of REDI Net, and has grown tremendously from those early days. We are grateful for the presence of REDI Net in the area and plan to continue to use it extensively.
With that said, running an ISP it is undesirable to have only one upstream provider. It presents a single point of failure should REDI Net go down (which has happened a few times) and provides limited routing options to the outside world.
Over the last few months, we have brought a second upstream provider online, and network traffic has been routing over both this second provider and REDI Net for the past week. Furthermore, today we finally added true IPv6 connectivity to our network. We've had IPv6 in testing on our own connection at the office and Brock's home connection for months now, via a tunnel with HE.net. Now that we have an upstream provider that fully supports IPv6, we can begin to route customer IPv6 traffic. We still have the backup connection with HE.net and are pressuring REDI Net to deploy IPv6 as well.
IPv6 is important to us because the world is out of IPv4 addresses. Black Mesa Wireless was turned down by ARIN for more IPv4 addresses several months ago, because they have no more to issue. We are currently in testing for the deployment of IPv6-only customers, and will begin to roll out new customers on IPv6 only in the near future. We have been extensively testing 464XLAT technologies, which will allow IPv6-only customers to access the IPv4 Internet. Moving forward, we will soon be charging extra for IPv4 addresses for new customers, as they are very much a finite commodity.
If you have any questions about using IPv6, please submit a message at http://bmwl.co/contact-us/
Brock M Tice, President and Co-Owner, Black Mesa Wireless LLC
Due to harmful interference from other spectrum users in Espanola we are troubleshooting one of the High School water tank access points now. We should be finished by 17:30 on 6/25.
Today we finally put up our second and final Española tower! Its installation had been postponed repeatedly for a number of reasons. This will be our final tower for some time, as we are implementing an expansion freeze to focus on our existing service areas.
The tower will be in testing for at least one week to ensure everything is functioning properly. Once testing is complete, we will begin installing customers with access via that tower. Thank you for your patience, and know that we have been working to balance expansion with service of existing customers, with emphasis on the latter.
Belkin is having a worldwide issue with their routers right now. If you have a Belkin router you may be able to use this workaround.
We generally recommend against Belkin routers. Our customers have had nothing but problems with them.
The power outage in Velarde on Sunday lasted one hour, five minutes. None of our network infrastructure shut down during this time, due to our extensive use of solar power and battery backups.
The REDI Net switch we are connected to went down after 20 minutes without power.
We hope this week to be connected to another REDI Net switch close to one of our towers, and a third in the next month or so. This will help us avoid disconnection in case of a power outage at one location.
As a reminder, if there is a power outage, your Internet service will go down unless you have a battery backup at your home or business, and all networking equipment required for your connection is powered by the battery backup. Such backups can be purchased inexpensively. This is a good example and will power your radio and router for approximately 7 hours:
Please feel free to contact us with any questions about this outage and power or network issues in general at support@blackmesawireless.com or 844-544-9499.
We are currently experiencing an Internet service outage due to a village-wide power outage in Velarde. Most of our equipment is on a battery backup, but unfortunately the REDI Net equipment in Velarde does not have a very long battery backup.
As such, we have no connectivity to REDI Net at this time. Once power is restored we expect service to be restored.
We have been working for months to establish additional connections to REDI Net throughout the valley to avoid this problem, but political issues in Espanola at the city, county, and school board levels have delayed our efforts.
We continue to work to establish these additional service connections and will let you know once they are completed.
Thank you for your patience.
As of today, our tower on Black Mesa (the longer, northern one) is live. We now have coverage of most of Española and even some points south of the city. However, we are working to add more tower locations in Española proper to ensure high-quality service. At the moment, points farther south than Lowe's may require a 2' dish for service quality that meets our stringent requirements.
We will post more updates here as we expand service. As always, please click here to register for a FREE site survey to check your lines of sight and signal.
Coverage as of 2014-05-02
As we grow we keep a close eye on our upstream bandwidth (you can, too!), and recently we got close to saturating it several times in a row.
As we promise in our terms of service, we upgraded our connection to REDI Net to handle the additional traffic and prevent slowing of service to customers. We guarantee we will do this if the connection is saturated for at least half an hour, but we prefer to upgrade before that ever happens.
There are other choices for Internet service in our service area, but none of them have the dedication to quality, transparency, and net neutrality that you will see from Black Mesa Wireless. We started this business because we understand the importance of a fast and reliable Internet connection in the modern world, and we'll deliver nothing less.
