Category: Jump Coverage

We have arrived at the start of a new month and it’s just as well everyone is taking a long King’s Birthday holiday break as the Jump Address Checker is still down. I know the Skinny team is trying to fix this, so hang in there.

Just one update for my earlier message about using the Skinny address checker. You can continue to use this but beware of the ‘fibre trap’ and the plan availability. Skinny offers both wireless and fibre solutions, so when you use this checker, it reports on the availability of plans for all services potentially available at this address (including fibre). So make sure you are checking the wireless options and scroll down to check that the plan is available.

Note in the example below from the Skinny Address Checker that:

(1) a Wireless Connection is available; and

(2) the wireless plan is available “CHOOSE THIS PLAN”. If it says “NOT AVAILABLE” as for the $55 plan, then this means there is no capacity at this address and you can not proceed with a Jump connection.

Hopefully, by the time you back from your King’s Birthday holiday, this will be old news and the Jump checker will be back in operation.

Vanessa Tedesco from the Fingertip Library in Christchurch alerted me at 8.46am this morning that the Jump address checker was not working. Since then, I have received numerous alerts from other partners.

Usually with issues like this, the software team at Spark is onto it like a shot, and before I can get around to a blog post, the problem has been sorted. But here we are over 8 hours later and when I checked a few minutes ago, the address checker was still not working.

I have been advising everyone who contacted me to use the Skinny Wireless Broadband address checker as a backup.

Skinny Jump uses the same wireless network as Skinny Wireless Broadband customers, so this should be pretty reliable.

I’ll provide an update when Skinny advises me that the Jump address checker has been fixed.

I received two inquiries yesterday from partners who are consistently getting the ‘no coverage’ message on the Skinny Jump address checker in some areas of their communities. Both raised the same question – how can we get the capacity boosted on the cell towers serving these communities.

The short answer is that this is outside our (DIAA) control and even outside the control of the Skinny Jump team. The Skinny Jump network is part of the Spark cell network and when towers reach capacity they must await their turn for upgrading.

The Jump address checker is updated with cell tower capacity information every night, and as the customer base is changing all the time, things can change literally overnight. So what can you do about it?

(1) When you encounter a customer in a ‘no coverage’ area, you can complete an online application and this signals to us there is demand at this location. We re-check the address and if it still has no coverage we transfer the application to a ‘no coverage’ database.

(2) We then recheck this address again 1-2 weeks later and if there is still no coverage we send an email to the customer, encouraging them to re-check themselves from time to time in case capacity becomes available.

(3) We aggregate the ‘no coverage’ data by location and share this with the Jump team, who in turn alert the Spark network team. But we know the Spark team will already be aware of towers that have reached capacity and will most likely already have an upgrade plan.

(4) Since the start of this year, we have had 411 customers register through this process, just 3% of all Jump requests. What of course we don’t know is how many customers are turned away without completing an online application form.

(5) The suburbs that have experienced the most cell tower capacity constraints are:

Suburb	No coverage
Auckland – Henderson	20
Auckland – Manurewa	16
Auckland – Papakura	9
Dargaville – Dargaville	9
Rotorua – Victoria	9
Auckland – Otara	8
Levin – Levin	7
Napier – Onekawa	6
Auckland – Papatoetoe	5
Auckland – Ranui	5
Rotorua – Glenholme	5
Auckland – Massey	4
Kaitaia – Kaitaia	4
Lower Hutt – Naenae	4
Rotorua – Owhata	4
Auckland – Mangere East	3
Auckland – Mt Wellington	3
Auckland – Pukekohe	3
Christchurch – Shirley	3
Hamilton – Claudelands	3
Kaiwaka – RD 2, Kaiwaka	3
New Plymouth – Marfell	3
Rotorua – Fairy Springs	3

4pm Wednesday 3 May 2023

Thank you everyone, for your patience, and we apologise for any inconvenience this has caused in signing up new customers for Jump.

The technical teams at Spark believe they have fixed the root cause of the Skinny Jump address checker issue. Earlier today, the Christchurch Jump team discovered that this appeared to be working again, and we have been testing addresses since then to confirm that all is well.

So, you can now return to ‘business as usual’, but please be aware that the Jump systems are still ‘settling back in, following the outage’ in the words of the Spark Jump team. They have assured us they will be continuing to monitor all the Jump systems to make sure.

And remember that if you do encounter problems with the Skinny Jump address checker, you can use the regular Skinny Broadband checker. Both use the same database for Skinny 4G coverage and availability checks.

If you do discover anything that doesn’t seem to be working as it should, please get in touch with us (jump@diaa.nz or 0800 463422) and we’ll escalate to the Spark Jump team as required.

10.00 am Wednesday 3 May 2023

Skinny technical teams have confirmed an issue with the Jump address checker, as a result of yesterday’s systems outage. Unfortunately, due to the complexity of the issue, they are estimating that it will not be fixed for at least 12 hours.

In the meantime, they have suggested the Skinny Wireless Broadband checker as an alternative workaround until the Jump address checker can be fixed.

8.30 am Wednesday 3 May 2023

I have started processing the Jump online applications and am getting the ‘no coverage’ message for every address. I have alerted the Jump team at Spark, so hopefully, this is a quick fix.

Earlier this week, we encountered a situation where the Skinny Jump address checker wasn’t working and not surprisingly this generated a number of inquiries from Jump partners.

I was probably the first to discover this, as I start processing Jump online applications first thing every morning. By 7.30am I had raised an alert with Alan in Spark’s Jump squad and hoped this might have been fixed while you were still having your breakfast.

Alan was onto this superfast and had his finger poised to do a red alert (I think they call it Priority One alert). Meanwhile many of you had finished your breakfasts and were on the job – did you know that every day Jump partners sign up around 50 Jump customers.

Thank you to everyone who contacted me on our jump@diaa.nz email – you absolutely did the right thing. I’m just sorry that you had customers before the issue was resolved.

At 2:17pm we were notified that the issue had been fixed – it had been caused by an overnight software update.

Should this ever happen again, please do what I did to keep the Jump wheels turning – I went to the Skinny main site (not Jump) and checked the address there (under Broadband tab). This does take a bit of care because almost every address that is typed into the main Skinny site gives the green light. You need to scroll down and look at what broadband services are available and sometimes you will find that a fixed line fibre solution is available, but not the 4G wireless option.

Skinny Jump relies on 4G wireless capacity, so if the main Skinny site says there is no 4G available, then you can safely deduce that Jump is not available either.

Having said all that, this might never happen again – it is some years since we have had any problems with the Jump address checker, so it is good to know there is a work-around should this ever happen again.