Perhaps they're just warming up for the Olympics when everyone in the South East is supposed to be working from home?
BT broadband packs up again - second big outage in a fortnight
BT has once again suffered what appears to be a major network outage affecting what the company described as "multiple areas". A simple update on BT's customer status page currently reads: We're really sorry but we've got a problem at the moment affecting our broadband service, which means that some of our customers will be …
-
-
Thursday 5th July 2012 13:39 GMT theloon
In a BT video interview a few months back they actually suggested everyone needs to their normal work places, as their domestic bandwidth will be limited during the Olympics. Good to see that after 5 years of planning they have added the capacity needed. Naturally this video has been deleted, but I was fortunate enough to watch the web-broadcast live.
-
-
Thursday 5th July 2012 12:59 GMT Matt Williams
One of our BT Infinity lines fell over this morning so we switched over to the other one which is fine. If they both fall over, I'll be bothered to try and fix it.
My point is, though, that I would be willing to bear a hundred years of such service from BT in preference to ever having to deal with TalkTalk again. A couple of days ago they started to try and invoice me again for a service that they cancelled a year ago - cancelled through sheer incompetence and deceit on their part. Something good came of it though - it prompted me to create a diagram that shows where TalkTalk appear on the customer service continuum: http://revs.org/blog/where-does-talktalk-appear-on-the-customer-service-continuum/
-
Thursday 5th July 2012 14:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
Talktalk not bad for me
However I had a nightmare trying to sort out the Old Man's broadband with BT. It had a stuck B-RAS profile of 500kbps. After 4 engineers visits, insistence there was nothing wrong at the exchange (less than a mile away) and multiple calls dealing with call centre numpities eventually they said oh it's an exchange fault. This took 4 weeks to resolve. Grrrrrrrr
-
-
-
Thursday 5th July 2012 16:23 GMT Powelly
Re: 12 sites down
I've always found Demon really reliable for me. It's been down once in the five years since we've been a customer. That was an epic 5 day outage that included our voice line for the first 2 days and was about a fortnight before my wife was due to give birth. In that case a BT Engineer had been working in the cabinet 20 yards down the road just before it went down, but you'd be a fool and a charlatan to think it was related - complete coincidence according to Openreach!
We're looking at moving from Demon, but that's purely down to their frankly ridiculous FUP, which chops your speeds to 128K, but gives you no option to pay for extra when you use over 50GB per 30 days.
-
Thursday 5th July 2012 19:44 GMT dak
Re: 12 sites down
That was why I left them a month ago after 15 years(!). What made it worse was that their tech support told me that the data slurping was due to TV downloads when in fact we had a mail client continually refreshing its database.
With Plusnet now. Dumped BT at the same time. An easy change over, and the broadband is seven times faster.
-
Thursday 5th July 2012 20:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: 12 sites down
Not really dumped BT have you? given that Plusnet is a subsiduary of BT, though have to admit I am thinking of using them, 'cos at least thir FUP and shaping are published, rather than BT's hidden in the web equivilent of downstairs in a filing cabinet behind a door with a sign that mentions leopards.
Are Plusnet any good?
-
-
Friday 6th July 2012 12:48 GMT Vic
Re: 12 sites down
> I've always found Demon really reliable for me.
They're a pain when there's a problem, though.
I had a customer with a Demon connection. It had failed, and I had to get it sorted pronto.
Their "help" line looked at the account, and proclaimed "Oh, that's a business account. I'm not trained to do Business support".
Three times they cut me off before I got someone who would actually look at it.
Vic.
-
-
-
Thursday 5th July 2012 13:16 GMT richard 7
Portsmouth
Waterlooville, Cosham and Central exchanges are/were affected. Modems all showing Showtime but CHAP authentication is being thrown back, bizarrley I can see the authentication going through then the process restarts and throws the firewall for a loop as it was told the login was ok.
BT Broadband customers are popping back up onto our radar but no Infinity users have come back up yet.
-
-
Thursday 5th July 2012 13:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
multiple lines down nationwide
We had multiple sites across the country down, however not every line we had with them.
was down for about 45mins then all sites back up again at the same time.
Looked like a Primary Radius server fault and as "richard 7" mentioned Chap was timing out then we were given a private IP - suspiciously similar to the test ip BT give out for BT_test user accounts.
-
Thursday 5th July 2012 13:52 GMT SImon Hobson
Re: multiple lines down nationwide
Yes, it most definitely wasn't restricted to London, or even South - we had two customers in the North West go down.
I have out of band access to one site, and yes, I saw the private addressing as well.
It gets interesting when you use automated monitoring to watch customer connections - you just wouldn't believe how many are taken down, and how frequently, by routine work in the early hours of the morning.
-
Thursday 5th July 2012 14:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: multiple lines down nationwide
"It gets interesting when you use automated monitoring to watch customer connections - you just wouldn't believe how many are taken down, and how frequently, by routine work in the early hours of the morning."
And when would you expect this necessary routine work takle place? Noon?
Wow, honestly, the general public's reaction to outages is just extreme.
-
-
-
-
-
Thursday 5th July 2012 14:10 GMT Lee Dowling
Re: Irony
We're a school with 380 pupils, we have 2 BT lines here, both were knocked out simultaneously (as in, died before Linux could spot a dead route). So our load balancing / failover of them didn't help any (I know it's not proper failover because it's the same exchange but one line is usually always up when the other is down - and, yes, strange disconnects at 5-to-9 and 6 am aren't unusual at all, so much so I have text-control of the ADSL router's power so I can reboot them remotely if we need to VPN in).
Fortunately, we have experience of this (despite being so close to the exchange, I could lend them some Ethernet cable and get a better connection) so we have the same 3G stick that provides the SMS text reception also stuck into the Linux server permanently and failover to it manually when we want to. Costs us about £2 for the day on T-Mobile or whatever but works good enough to run a school off with appropriate caching and certainly better than nothing.
We also saw the 172.0.0.0 subnet address and the usual junk (i.e. getting the right IP but can't do anything with it in some kind of "dead" session, etc. - hence why we have the remote-power-cycle system in the first place).
But BT service status said "next time for resolution: 15:00" at one point so I didn't wait for them to try to resolve it. Seems to be fixed now, but my boss here just moved locally and he has the same problems constantly with BT too.
Weirdly, on PlusNet, I never had an outage in nearly 10 years, and certainly never for longer than a router-reboot, and didn't get these kind of constant disconnects (lucky if we get 48 hours before one of the two routers needs to be kicked again) or false IP's when it did come back up (wonder how many home users are still running on a 172 address that doesn't route now and will be until they reboot their router?
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Thursday 5th July 2012 14:49 GMT NellyD
Re: Hubs?
Good. Now pop in to the nearest PC world, ask them for a hub and then try getting it to connect to the internet.
In the 10+ years we had our BT connection it's always been Cisco kit they've supplied. Had they ever phoned us up and said to "reboot our hub" we'd have ditched them a damn site sooner than we did.
*Burns pedant hat*
-
Thursday 5th July 2012 16:39 GMT Anthony Hegedus
Re: Hubs?
Actually if you went to your nearest PC world and asked for a hub, they'd probably sell you a router, after first ensuring it's got a DSL modem if you're using Virgin Cable or Satellite, or just a regular ethernet WAN port if you use ADSL. Except they'd call it a DSL router if it was actually the one for Cable broadband.
Actually, they'd probably sell you a Norton antivirus at only half the double normal price. And a USB cable that costs £40.
In point of face, there's (probably) no such thing as a network hub any more. About 15 years ago they got replaced by proper network switches. A network hub allows for all the bandwidth (say 10Mbit/s) to be shared with all the ports, thus creating a massive slowdown when people actually start working. A network switch allows for much greater bandwidth as it switches traffic between relevant ports almost as fast as the circuit allows (10/100/1000Mbit/s). A switch and a hub effectively do the same thing from and end user point of view. So a switch is like a sort of... hub... I suppose.
-
-
-
-
-
-
Thursday 5th July 2012 14:08 GMT Alister
"In and around London"
That must be a very broad definition, here in Derbyshire, out of four sites on BT business Broadband two went down, two stayed up, even though they are all connected to the same exchange. Very peculiar...
Those two that were down, had a full ADSL session, and a PPP session, and had IP's assigned, they just weren't passing traffic.
-
Thursday 5th July 2012 14:15 GMT Enverex
Also Worcester it seems...
Starting getting random behaviour on FTTC line around midnight last night (connection would work for around 3MB worth of traffic and then just stop, but still believing it's sync'ed and connected).
My home network appears to have disappeared entirely around 12:20 (pm) today now.
-
Thursday 5th July 2012 16:52 GMT Peter Revell
Taking the piss out of TalkTalk
I know this fashionable, but I have been a very satisfied user of Tiscali since April 2006 and the only incident I had early on was dead slow downloads which were due to 'faulty protocols' installed by my previous ISP - Plusnet! The Tiscali engineer located them where Plusnet had failed on several occasions. I get 3.6 - 3.7 Meg regularly which I am happy with for copper wire buried without protection in chalk marl/clay soil for 44 years. Good old GPO!
-
Thursday 5th July 2012 19:45 GMT James Hayes
Don't bother calling support...
...you'll likely end up speaking to the guy i dealt with yesterday - although that was about a failed order. To say he had "limited" information at his disposal is an understatement.
The chat transcript is quite amusing for anyone who has any experience of tech support lines: http://www.hitcl.com/2012/07/bt-below-terrible/ if you want to take a look.