A message from Orbit Online Admin:
If you are a user of the Orbit Online website, some serious technical issues have come up over the past few weeks.
The Orbit Online server has been a guest in an office; we have been fortunate that we were able to benefit from their internet connection for many years. Unfortunately, two primary factors have led to Orbit’s unexpected and untimely disconnection.
- Wiring. Our gracious hosts are located in an old area of the city where the wiring is just as old, and occasionally requires repair. This alone is merely inconvenient, until you introduce another issue…
- Corporate inflexibility and incompetence. Internet service by TELUS running on local wiring managed by Bell Canada is in short, a nightmare.
So what happened? Details are unclear, but it seems that during some routine wiring repairs Bell Canada broke the TELUS internet connection. Unfortunately, these two large corporations have very inflexible processes and rather than try to fix a problem, they resist, preferring to blame each other instead. TELUS says they don’t own the lines so it’s Bell’s problem. Bell says they only help their own customers and that it must be a TELUS problem.
Over a period of many days, and many, many (dozens, I’m told) exasperating telephone calls to Bell and TELUS, a Bell technician finally repaired the problem. Although our hosts were exasperated, everything seemed to be working.
A short while later something broke again, and the frustrating process of trying to get two big companies to work together had to be repeated. Again, after another period without Internet and many more near-pointless telephone calls, another technician was finally dispatched and fixed the problem again. Yes! Finally..?
Sadly, not so. Whatever underlying reason is causing the breakage has apparently not been fixed. Based on what I’ve been told by the business owners, I personally suspect active intervention from one of the involved companies, along the lines of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. So, when the Internet broke again for the third time in the space of a month or so, our hosts decided they’d had enough and were going to switch providers.
As it turns out, the replacement service is not quite Orbit-compatible, so a new home must be found, even if it’s only a temporary one. Now that this is known, the servers have been retrieved and the search for a suitable place to stay is under way.
Sincere apologies for the inconvenience. Hope to know more soon.
– Goodspeed, 2012-01-30
Update 9:30 PM – Access temporarily restored http://orbitonline.ca/login
Another Talking Head 