Sky network downed in London Thousands of Sky and Easynet customers in south London and Surrey were knocked offline this morning by a major network fault. Connectivity via 14 exchanges was hit by the two hour failure, which was fixed at about 11am, according to a Sky spokesman. "The problem has now been fully resolved and we'd like to apologise to any …
"This is absolutely killing our sales office in London. We currently have an entire sales team crowded round a laptop fighting over access to a Vodafone dongle!"
Businesses that don't have a backup internet connection from a different ISP are just asking for trouble. How much would it cost to get a basic ADSL connection on a different network?
One Reg reader wrote: "This is absolutely killing our sales office in London. We currently have an entire sales team crowded round a laptop fighting over access to a Vodafone dongle!"
So who decided to run a business critical IT function with no well tested backup plan ? Oh sorry, they did have a backup plan: a single Vodafone dongle to replace an entire office's ADSL link. Yeah, well thought out guys/gals. Do you want me to send you job application forms for Subway ? I hear they're hiring...
"One Reg reader wrote: "This is absolutely killing our sales office in London. We currently have an entire sales team crowded round a laptop fighting over access to a Vodafone dongle!""
So stop being so tight and get some form of backup service. God almighty, what is wrong with people. Stop depending on a single link for something that isn't expensive to start with, and is clearly peanuts compared to the hassle it causes.
I've had multiple broadband links at home for years and years, despite my home use hardly qualifying as "critical", never mind my office which it comes naturally.
Paris, cause she knows how to keep it coming thick and fast despite the occasional loss.
"This is absolutely killing our sales office in London. We currently have an entire sales team crowded round a laptop fighting over access to a Vodafone dongle!"
Second dongle, Backup ADSL line never considered? Maybe Sky are so reliable that the ROI wasn't deemed acceptable. Nevertheless this is hardly wonderful business continuity planning. Perhaps fighting ones way through shoppers in order to obtain more dongles would be more productive.
I'm sorry I have no sympathy for the predicament, nothing personal, the term "sales team" doesn't fill me with a warm glow.
1) Everyone was fighting over my dongle at work today. Heh....
2) I wonder if this is related to this I read on slashdot: http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg15468.html (From Feb 16, "invalid or corrupts AS path"). Apparently someone was inserting improper routing table info, making routes work but excessively long. The slashdotters commented this excessively long route didn't bother a lot of kit -- but (at least some) Cisco models would see the excessively long path and take a dump. So technically not a hardware problem, but switching the hardware out (even with a different model Cisco) may be the fastest solution for Sky to get back online.
For a sales team, it might be worth investing in a dual-WAN router (these can be had for just over £100), and then a second broadband connection from a totally different provider.
That way if one provider goes down, you'll only notice a reduction in speed, rather than the complete absence of an effective sales team.
I have to laugh at the users who're whinging about their sales office being killed. I have absolutely no sympathy for companies that have no redundancy and then complain about loss of business when the service goes down. If it mattered that much to them, they'd have some proper backup!
"One Reg reader wrote: "This is absolutely killing our sales office in London. We currently have an entire sales team crowded round a laptop fighting over access to a Vodafone dongle!"."
This kind of thing never ceases to amaze me. As someone who works in ISP support (not saying which one), I am shocked by comments like the one above. If your entire business depends on the internet.... HAVE A BACKUP CONNECTION!!! preferably ON A DIFFERENT CONNECTION MEDIA IF AVAILABLE!!!
Our ISP backbone runs on mainly antiquated copper wire and PSTN exchanges as Demarc points... if one of these goes down, you won't get any work done.
GET A BLOODY BACKUP SYSTEM IN PLACE!!!! Oh and if BT want to maybe do something about the state of the UK broadband network (Specifically in Scotland) that would be a help too.
/RANT
The amount of times I've heard "But I need it my business depends on it" when they are paying for a bog standard cheap as chips residential DSL package. My answer is always so ok internet connectivity is important so what's your backup solution? Oh you don't have one? I guess you will have to look at getting on now.
These people claim they are loosing thousand's due to a fault but they wont pay out even a basic expense for some kind of resilience. If you must go with DSL pay for enhanced care (the closest thing you will ever get to an SLA), ideally have a dual WAN router that can fail over to another medium (cable or DSL that's provided via the opposite to the other connections). A lot of routers will now support fail over to a 3G dongle.
Push come to shove people can still use dial up, It would be slow as hell but you would be able to work (emails etc).
Best option though by far is a leased line with DSL backup anyone that actually does need the internet for their business and cares about a decent connection should have that kind of setup.
"I think Sky might have just lost a few business customers because of this incident."
Oh do get a grip lad. Business customers will take this in their stride and carry on as normal when service resumed. They're not going to get all bent out of shape over something like this, unless it becomes a regular happening.
Anyroadup, Sky's T&Cs forbid the use of their service for business use. For that you have to go to UK Online or Easynet which are different businesses. So even if the "business" went all Petulant Petunia it wouldn't be Sky who would lose any customers. So there. With knobs on.
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