Are you receiving me, over?

I’m putting this out there in case others have experienced something similar: is the New Zealand internet constantly down?
   I’ve had the same email address since 1995. Yet, this year, a noticeable number of New Zealanders have telephoned here, saying that their messages have bounced. Even one team member has said that, if she uses her home ISP, her messages to me also bounce. In one case, we had to resort to fax to get the document across.
   This year, I’ve clicked on (foreign) search engine results or advertisements to get to an error page. Only when I hit ‘Refresh’ does the page eventually come through. This has not happened with the same frequency as it does today.
   I’m sitting here today after sending three very important emails to channel partners over the weekend, and have not had a reply to them. I’m wondering, now, since I used a New Zealand ISP’s SMTP, whether I’m in the same shoes as the others who have tried to reach me. Certainly, in one case, the domain for FTPing was unreachable on Saturday on my first attempt. And TelstraClear—though it’s not the only party with sending problems, as I know one of my clients is on Xtra—does not send me bounces.
   I should explain that despite being HQed here, our server has always been Stateside. This was a consequence of some rules regarding foreign web server traffic back in the 1990s. As we knew that most of our traffic would come from overseas—a logical conclusion given that New Zealand’s population is so small—and as local hosting companies were charging what I thought were rip-off prices in those days, we’ve always been hosted either on the US east coast (New York and Virginia) or, since 2002, a dedicated server in the south.
   But it’s not as though this domain is so new that it doesn’t reside on DNSs around New Zealand.
   My theories are not conspiratorial, for a change. But they are concerning, because it makes me wonder about our national internet infrastructure, and how far we might have fallen behind in the last decade.
   I have heard, from people who know more about the infrastructure than me, that we have fallen considerably behind in the last decade, though I don’t know exactly in which areas other than overall speed and, as of this year, civil liberties, democracy and the rule of law.
   I suspect that with growing internet usage, local servers are not resolving addresses as efficiently as they used to. There are more addresses to hold on to, so if you aren’t at the very top of the list (Google, Facebook, etc.), then you’re going to be forgotten. And since my address is the company’s one, and not Lucire’s, it isn’t really going to be among those top ones.
   It might mean that from now on, I’m going to have to use our own mailserver, rather than our ISP’s, to get emails across. At least that’s based in Texas, and I can be assured that my emails are getting to the US and the UK.
   If anything happens, at least I know I’d get a fair hearing with the Americans on their own soil than I would under our American-imposed copyright laws.
   Anyone else here with an overseas mailbox—and not one of the webmail services like Gmail or Hotmail—experiencing similar issues?


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3 thoughts on “Are you receiving me, over?

  1. If you’re primarily with TelstraClear, then I know why. It’s to do with their transparent proxies and caching. Stale content within their system is what often causes fail loads and the like. It’s bad.

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