Fortana internet services back online

Interstate link behind outage.

ISP Fortana has resumed internet services for customers in two states after they were knocked offline for up to five days by a change in upstream providers.

The ISP, which was acquired by managed services provider Enterprise IT Global (EITG) in late April, confirmed the outage in a note posted on the Whirlpool broadband forums last Tuesday.

Enterprise IT Global chief Jarrod Case posted a day later that the outage had been caused by the termination of an agreement between Fortana and Nextgen for use of an interstate link.

It appeared the arrangement had been terminated prior to EITG's establishment of alternate transit arrangements, which included cross-connects between Fortana points of presence and EITG racks in three states.

Case told iTnews that close proximity of Fortana and EITG's racks in a Sydney data centre had allowed a cross-connect to be made more quickly than in other states.

"Other PoP sites couldn't be cross-connected quick enough – the reality was we had to wait," he said.

Case characterised some of the supply arrangements it inherited from Fortana as "frail".

Fortana suppliers were not used in other parts of the EITG business and were more expensive than existing EITG suppliers, sparking a post-acquisition consolidation effort, he said.

The buyout

While he declined to reveal how much EITG paid for Fortana, Case said it was a "small transaction" and that the business accounted for "less than six percent of our [total] revenue".

He said that Fortana had "some great IT assets", notably "hundreds of thousands of dollars of second-hand Cisco equipment".

"They completely overbuilt the network and it wasn't viable to continue," Case said of Fortana's old management.

In a statement [pdf], EITG said that the Fortana business would be fully integrated with EITG sometime next month.

Fortana was perhaps best known in recent times as a tester on Telstra's Point Cook FTTP network near Melbourne.