Technical Support
AST have accumulated a wealth of experience in the field of repair, maintenance and installation of satellite equipment in both marine & land based environments worldwide. Fully trained in-house engineers can offer bespoke installations, training, repairs, software upgrades and PCB board replacements.
AST operate a 24 hour, 7 day a week helpline where we can offer support on the following:
- technical help on products and services supplied by AST
- billing enquiries (including emergency top-ups, deactivations & suspensions)
- returns authorisation numbers
t: +44 (0)1493 441 485
e: customer.service@ast-uk.com
Alerts
27/05/10 - Iridium Service Outage | May 2010
The Iridium switch upgrades which AST advised you of took place on 19th May 10 in which Iridium performed a cutover to a new switching technology at its gateway in Tempe, Arizona.
Despite significant testing over many months by our switch vendor and ourselves, unforeseen problems during the upgrade process caused two minor outages and subsequent to the upgrade certain services were intermittently impacted. Given these issues along with a third more severe outage experienced on Sunday morning, our technical teams have made the decision to roll back to the previous switch type in order to ensure network availability.
The network is currently stable and all services are nominal. AST immediately escalated the issues and are receiving full support from our vendor. Our two teams are working diligently to understand the root cause and identify the proper corrective action. We will keep you updated as we gain more information on the timing of the corrective action and the plans for the future upgrade. At this time, we expect the effort to take several weeks.
AST would like to apologies on behalf of Iridium for any inconveniences you have incurred as a result of these outages.
21/05/10 - Iridium Network Issues – Ongoing since 19 May 10
Services Impacted
Telephony; SMS; Follow-Me Paging; Circuit-Switched Data (Dial-Up, RUDICS, Direct Internet, Mobile Terminated); Short Burst Data; Iridium OpenPort Voice.
Services not impacted
Standalone Paging; Iridium OpenPort Data
Begin Date: May 19, 2010
Begin Time: 22:00 (GMT)
End Date: TBD
End Time: TBD
Comments
Iridium will be performing critical network maintenance related to the cutover of the Siemens D900 Switch with the Ericsson AXE-810 Switch
Service outages associated with this unplanned maintenance are expected to last up to 15 minutes, although subscribers may notice intermittent service interruptions for up to two hours.
This maintenance will have the following specific service impacts: Voice and circuit-switched data calls in progress will drop Subscribers will not be able to place or receive voice calls Subscribers will not be able to place or receive circuit-switched data calls (Dial-Up, RUDICS, Direct Internet, Mobile Terminated) Subscribers will not be able to use Iridium OpenPort voice services Follow-Me Pages will not be delivered SMS service will be intermittent, and some messages may not be delivered Short Burst Data service will operate in a degraded mode for a short (less than 1 minute) period of time.
Please note that the following services will not be affected: Standalone Paging Iridium OpenPort Data services