Following the government announcement on Saturday 31st October of a second national lockdown, this post provides information on the continued delivery and support of Janet services.
Delivering Janet services
Delivery of Janet services can be split into 2 main areas – Projects and BAU.
Projects are where we contract a range of suppliers and construct large network infrastructures, often spanning entire regions of the country (see the Janet Access Programme). We’ve consulted with our key delivery partners and they have all confirmed that the November lockdown will just mean a continuation of the processes and precautions they put in place for previous lockdowns. So in terms of what will change between Wednesday 4th November (pre-lockdown) and Thursday 5th November (lockdown), very little. All suppliers do cite access to customer premises as the biggest risk to delivery, which we of course understand and are keen to work on with members and customer to limit the impact.
BAU is the process of providing individual services to individual customers, on request, usually comprising Openreach circuit products and often network hardware as well. Again we’ve consulted with our key delivery partners who have reassured us that nothing is changing, just a continuation of what is in place today. Again all suppliers cite access to customer premises as the biggest risk to delivery.
As well as contracting with partners for Project and BAU delivery, we also do a lot of build and commissioning work ‘in house’ using our own engineers. We’ve reviewed and updated our documented position on methods and duration of travel, overnight stays, on-site precautions, etc, and we’ll of course continue to monitor the national picture with the health and safety of our engineers at the forefront of planning and policy, but as with partners nothing is really changing and we’ll carry on delivering Janet on the same basis as we do today.
Maintaining Janet services
In short, if your Janet service suffers a fault, we’ll fix it, more than likely within SLA (subject to the usual force majeure caveats). Nothing is changing in this area and restoring service where it has failed remains top priority for Jisc and our subcontractors. As with delivery, all of our network maintenance and support partners foresee their new BAU processes and precautions continuing into lockdown, and more than likely beyond for quite some time. Also as with delivery, suppliers cite access to customer premises as the biggest risk is restoring service.
In summary
In summary, not a lot will change in 3 days’ time, and we’ll continue to monitor both the national picture, and Janet specific issues, and will evolve our position accordingly.