Category: Skinny Jump

Special Alert for Jump Ciena Partners

We have had two Ciena customers contact us to ask why their Ciena Plan did not renew on 1 May. We escalated this to the Skinny Jump team at Spark in case this was a system glitch that could be affecting other Ciena customers.

The good news is that this isn’t a system glitch, so hopefully only two customers have been affected. The reason identified is that these two customers attempted to purchase additional data during month and when they did this, their accounts reverted to standard Skinny Jump.

The Jump team acknowledges that this could be confusing for customers and would like to remove the top-up option altogether for anyone on a sponsored plan, but this involves further software development and this could take some time.

As an immediate fix, any customer on a sponsored plan who attempts to top-up their account will now receive an error message.

This does highlight how important it is that Ciena partners carefully explain that being on a Ciena plan means they cannot top-up their accounts, as they are already receiving the maximum of 6 top-ups (210GB) each month.

We acknowledge that the User Guide and Partner Guides do not really cover this situation and this is something the Jump team is going to take a look at, but in the meantime, please make a special point of explaining this to Ciena applicants.

We will contact the two families that have raised this with us – their accounts have already been reset for the Ciena plan. Please contact us on jump@diaa.nz if any customer raises this issue with you and we can arrange for their accounts to be re-provisioned with the Ciena plan. Thank you.

Jump System Outage Resolved

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.

Probably another 12 hours to fix the Skinny Jump address checker

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.

Skinny Jump still offline

10.00 am Tuesday 2 May 20123

Unfortunately, the issue is still ongoing. Technical teams have been able to restore some internal Spark systems but as of now, the Jump app and Online Dashboard continue to remain offline. Technical teams are estimating 2-3 hours for the issue to be fully resolved.

In the meantime please note:

(1) Jump customers’ wireless broadband services are not impacted by this outage.

(2) If a Jump customer calls 0800 4 SKINNY and selects Option # 3, they will hear IVR messaging advising customers of the current outage we are experiencing.

Urgent Alert affecting Skinny Jump

8am: Tuesday 2 May 2023

Spark is currently experiencing system issues and is working quickly to find a fix. Whilst this is ongoing, the Skinny Jump App, the Jump Dashboard and the Address Checker are offline. At this stage, we don’t have a timeline for the fix.

Our suggestion is that all partners temporarily suspend any Jump signups until this is resolved.

Another important update for Ciena Partners

It is good to see that nearly half of the Jump Partners who are participating in the Ciena Pilot have now signed up one or more students in their area. Over 80 families with school-aged children are already benefitting.

But as partners sign up their first customers, they are discovering little challenges in remembering exactly what to do in terms of our back-end processes.

Yesterday a partner signed up their first customer and issued a new modem but then discovered the family already had a Jump modem. The family said “thank you very much for the new modem; we’ll bring the old one back”.

Unfortunately, issuing a new modem to family that already has a Jump connection creates a number of problems:

(1) Ciena modems are exactly the same as standard Jump modems; the only difference is the Jump plan (the Ciena Plan) that is applied to the customer’s account linked to the modem.

(2) We have an ongoing national shortage of modems; we do not issue replacement modems when the current one is working perfectly well and in the case of Ciena customers, this is a back-end process in terms of provisioning a new plan on the customer’s account (nothing to do with the hardware).

(3) Customers are unable to activate a replacement modem using the same email address until their old modem goes through our Modem Returns process (where the customer’s account is de-linked from the modem), and this generally takes up to 24 hours.

(4) Customers could use a different email for the replacement modem but then they would not be able to transfer any residual funds from their existing account to their new one.

So, any partner traversing this path is creating a lot of problems for their customer, when all that is needed is a new Profile Form (where the details of the existing modem are recorded) and the Ciena Referral Form. The Skinny Team then works their magic to reprovision the customer’s existing modem for the Ciena Plan. No new accounts to be set up. No new WiFi passwords needed. No modems to be returned. Simple as!

Modem de-linking: spotted by a resourceful librarian

In my enthusiasm to blog on matters relating to Jump, I have been caught out by a resourceful Auckland librarian. He was using his research skills to brush up on the modem delinking process and discovered one of my blog posts from 2020 explaining this. However, when he went to our Stepping UP website he discovered a totally different explanation.

The problem is that things change. Yet old blog posts, like many other online things, tend to hang around well beyond their useful date.   In fact if they hang around too long, I guess they will be picked up by OpenAI systems like ChatGPT or Bard and then get shared as mis-information. So what is the truth? A question I suspect we will be asking a lot more in the future.

While some of the advice in my 2020 post is still relevant, the detailed procedures were replaced by the flow chart on our website around the middle of 2022.  There was a blog post about this change too, but anyone searching on ‘de-linking Jump modems’ wouldn’t find this because it doesn’t use the keyword ‘de-link’. Instead it celebrates the launch of new procedures for handling faulty Jump modems.

Just in case anyone is unsure about current Jump modem fault handling procedures, here it is in a nutshell.

The default procedure is for customers to contact the Skinny Care Team in the first instance if they are having trouble with their modems.  Our back-end processes then take care of themselves with the modem either being fixed remotely or a replacement and recovery courier bag being sent directly to the customer.  The other path involving Jump Delivery Partners is for when customers don’t follow this procedure and turn up with a faulty modem at a delivery partner.  In this case we ask partners to complete the Modem Returns form and await email advice from the Skinny team that the modem has been reset and is available for re-issue, or if it is faulty a courier bag will be sent to the partner for recovery.  It can take up to 24 hours for the old modem to be delinked from the customer’s account and this must happen before the customer can use their same email to set up a new modem.

So as much as I hate to say it, my 2020 blog post is of historical interest only and should be ignored by present day partners.  The new procedures completely replace the need for partners to call the Skinny Care team or send emails to the Skinny support team.

But this is also a challenge for information specialists. In a digital world how do we ‘retire’ old and obsolete information. Does anyone really have the time to keep reviewing the past and correcting these things?

But the really good news is that people, like the Auckland librarian who raised this issue, are still around, and what do they do when they find conflicting information – they seek out the truth.