BT broadband goes TITSUP - cripples Scots, Geordies, Northern Irish Some of the telcos which depend on BT's network to offer broadband services to their customers have been reporting a major outage affecting thousands of people in the North of England, Northern Ireland and the two biggest cities in Scotland. ISP Zen Internet told its subscribers that BT's 20CN and 21CN circuits were currently …
Take the phone off the hook until you know what has gone wrong. That way you can concentrate on diagnosing it without answering idiot questions from know nothings.
Beer because I am sure the BT engineers (or whoever they have outsourced it to) will need lots after today.
No mention of BT Openreach? As I understand it BT Openreach are the wholesaler. BT Broadband (in your tttle) is for when BT is the ISP - with end products such as BT Infifinty. No wonder Joe Public thinks that they can only buy their broadband direct from BT.
As an aside, Plusnet FTTC in Greater Manchester seems unaffected - it would be interesting to know the topology to understand why Preston has taken the hit.
BT Openreach do the "last mile" between exchange and punter (oversimplified, but...).
For retail ISPs such as AAISP, the connectivity between the exchange and the ISP is provided (and in some ways managed) by another piece of BT, BT Wholesale.
Yes it's complicated.
Best just to think of BT as the default provider of frequently overpriced and underperforming voice and Internet services to the naive and ill-informed.
You sure?
I'm pretty sure that BT Openreach are the ones that maintain the entire physical connection, whereas BT Wholesale are the ones that sell/lease the various services that operate over these connections wholesale to retail ISPs, etc.
So basically if there was a problem between the ISP and the exchange, BT Openworld would be the guys to fix it, same if there was a problem between the exchange and your home.
Backhaul from the exchange is owned and managed by tier 1 service providers, rather than Openreach.
It's a complicated mix of ownership. In some cases BT will be leasing fibre off Virgin, in other cases the other way round. There's also C&W fibres in the mix. It's a complex peering arrangement, much like the connections on from these networks to the internet.
But no, Openreach don't own backhaul or the exchange kit (DSLAM/MSAN) that connects to it. Openreach are strictly HDF onwards towards the customer.
Went out at 9:02, back at 11:11 (thanks Nagios.) Just when I decided to vote "Yes" in 2014, BT lets me know the error of my ways. Must be connected 'cos the "No" campaign is called Better Together - BT geddit? NB for some commentards - some of this post may not be entirely serious.
"Different prices, different call centers, different staff. BT have, quite sensibly, been completely hands off the plusnet business since they bought it."
Codswallop. Most of the Plustnet Plc directors are ex-BT Retail...
John Petter - Managing Director, BT Consumer
Matthew James Davies - ex BT Payment Services Limited
Simon Curry - ex BT Business Direct Limited
Andy Wilson - previously Director of Revenue and Margin Assurance at BT Retail
The company is 100% owned by BT.
Plusnet v BT - whether they're different or not depends on the context.
From a broadband user point of view: chalk and cheese. Different pricing, different packages, different facilities (how many BT Retail users know what a 'static IP' is), different processes, different call centres, etc.
From a competitor's (and ideally from a regulator's) point of view: same shareholders, same CEO. Same company.
I would have recommended Plusnet until recently.
UK call centres usually excellent and (*usually...) good reliability.
However, I asked for an upgrade to fibre broadband, they gave me an afternoon slot for the engineer. Having took a half day off, the engineer didn't turn up til 8pm, only to tell me that I lived too far from the exchange.
Plusnet were ready for taking the fibre subscription direct debit until I told them. Then when they reverted to my usual 1mb rural broadband speed, they had doubled the price. Upon questioning this, I was told that it was because I lived too far from the exchange and they hadn't realised!
Complaint soon after / threatening to go to Sky Broadband (would work out cheaper but I would worry that the customer service would be VirginMedia-like) and they reinstated the previous charge for the original broadband.
Post Office have started a TalkTalk migration [oh, the horror!] which I understand is rolling so some customers may have been migrated already.
This won't have had anything to do with Openreach either - all they do is manage and deploy field infrastructure [fibre ducts, cabinets, copper cabling etc.] and connecting exchange kit and premises lines, they don't control or manage BT's actual core data centre kit or networks such as routers.
@ac
I've been with Plusnet long before they were bought over. I have been surprised - and pleased - that their customer service has remained as good as it always was.
Also their product still has all the stuff BT users don't care about, like fixed IP addresses, php webspace etc.
Having said that, my wife is at home without no internets this morning.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/16/bt_bids_plusnet/
One of the things it has enabled BT to do is continue to scam the halfawake regulators at Ofcon.
The majority of the public, like your good self, is unaware that Plusnet is BT Sheffield.
So, if someone looking for a provider has decided that BT are too overpriced, or their overseas customer service is intolerable, or whatever, they can look elsewhere, and quite possibly find that Plusnet appears to offer tolerable service at quite low prices (certainly a lot less than Big BT).
In particular, boutique ISPs from AAISP to Zen look massively expensive in comparison with Plusnet/BT Sheffield, although the service isn't really on the same planet either.
So although Big BT aren't supposed to use predatory pricing against their competition, BT Sheffield apparently still can, as far as the regulators are concerned.
Marvellous.
We're not talking about "the Internet" here, strictly speaking.
The failing connectivinty in question is provided by BTwholesale's 21st Century Network. It doesn't seem to understand the concept of "resilience" very well, does it. At least one of the ISPs who depend on BTw for connectivity to their broadband customers has even publically accused 21CN's design of "being unfit for purpose". (Yes that would be AAISP)
"At least with a 3G dongle I was able to get to the BT status page "
unless you're on Vodafiddle trying to access 3g data services from Portsmouth island, which hasn't worked reliably for the last 3 months!
Looks like the punters are going to have to organise their own network reliability plans, as the carriers don't seem capable.
Just one router did this? What? No hot fail-over? This is the danger of a mono-culture in ubiquitous tech. A single point of failure will always fail... I build tools to monitor very large scale network systems, and our gear can continue operating at full load after 2 failures at any point in the system - hardware or software. The worker drones at BT aren't at fault here - they are doing their job to the best of their considerable abilities. It is management that should be taken out to the woodshed because it is they who likely said that redundant routers, load-balancers, or whatever would cost too much...
Or, how about: we're selling these services dirt cheap to residential Internet users, with no SLA, we dont need to offer a fully resilient network because thats not conducive to the low cost product that the masses want.
But... if you're a business or enterprise customer and want to pay a bit more for a different kind of service, one that includes an SLA, then sure, we'll provision it in a redundant way such that maybe, and only maybe, the most catastrophic of events will cause an outage.
People seem to get all uppity when they buy something, agree to the terms under which it will be delivered, and then it fails and they wonder why.
Sure its not the worker drones fault, but I say its not managements fault either. Its the consumers fault for wanting to pay jack squat and expect something gold plated. If you want uninterrupted Internet access, youve got to pay more than a couple of 10'ers a month...
Don't know if it's related or not, but Plusnet were "performing some software upgrades on one of our RADIUS authentication servers." this morning, according to their customer service site. It was expected to be a 5 minute task.
Given that other ISPs were affected, I'd guess it's unlikely to have been the cause of today's problem.
They post warnings about future work like this all the time, and rarely are there any probs.
Seemingly (according to our discussions with the 20CN support desk this morning) BTO had installed a line card at the Edinburgh Exchange which then took down every card in the chassis; it _should_ have failed over to a juniper device, but didn't, thus resulting in the outage we experienced.
We lost circuits across the NE, NI and Scotland - SPOF fail!
This sounds like a recent bug that existed in Juniper T series routers, whereby installing an FPC would cause an upset somewhere in the system (I dont recall exactly where), and cause the entire box to stop forwarding traffic.
The company I work for had to (until recently when we got an updated JunOS that fixes the issue) entirely remove all traffic (gracefully) from a router before installing an FPC in case it went south and caused an ungraceful interruption to the network.
Assuming this is the same kind of problem, this should have allowed failover to occur had that been set up correctly, however. Things like routing protocols would drop adjacencies and simply route around the faulty router.
A couple of the shops that we look after dropped offline, so I took to the phone to find out what had happened.
Knowing that we used BT Enterprise, I rang BT.
However, I was told that although we clearly had an account with BT, for some reason the DSL account belonged to plusnet, so they couldn't help.
Fearing some dodgy business I rang up plusnet, only to be told, that actually, plusnet resell their own service to other ISPs, including....BT Enterprise.
I was about to ring Enterprise when it all started working again
If anyone can even explain wtf is going on with this I'd appreciate it, right now it sounds like the telecoms version of Inception.
Did you read the stuff here about Plusnet being part of BT these days? Did the Plusnet staff not tell you that too (maybe it didn't sink in)? Did your BT Enterprise/Workplace logon at http://workplace.btenterprise.com/main.html not shed any light on the matter?
Workplace was Plusnet's mostly-automated system for running a retail ISP in as close as they could get to zero-touch style, e.g. little need for useless and counterproductive script jockeys in call centres out East. At the time BT bought Plusnet, Workplace was said to be an important factor in the decision.
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