UK footie fans furious as Sky Broadband goes TITSUP: Total inability to stream unfair penalties The Sky Broadband service took an unscheduled half-time break last night, leaving residents of the UK Midlands unable to stream sporting action from Russia. Problems began at around 4pm yesterday with Sky's status page (followed later by its support account) reporting multiple exchange failures in Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire …
Ignoring the fact that "father's day" is purely an invention of greeting card manufactorer's desire to sell more product, lost of service should provide an immediately refund for the lost period.
Always on internet should be just what it says, lack of service should result in a automatic refund for the whole region affected.
Always on internet should be just what it says, lack of service should result in a automatic refund for the whole region affected.
And how do you monitor that? What constitutes a loss of service? BGP reconvergence takes maybe 30 seconds - are you going to refund people for 30 seconds on that one or the whole day?
And, dare I say it, we're talking about cheap consumer lines. If constant uninterrupted internet access is essential to you, you put in two lines from different providers, and you get contracts with stringent SLAs. But that's not cheap enough for you, so things like this happen. And it's fair to say that things like this only really happen occasionally.
Besides which, on the two occasions that my Plusnet line went off (once during upgrade to FTTC, and once due to a fault), I hooked my phone into my computer for my essential stuff. Streaming the football, whilst important to many, is hardly mission-critical.
Routing & Core Network Loss of Resilience
They seem to have had redundancy and no outage.
One update of interest:
Engineers are continuing to work on the fibre break.
The work is currently being delayed by numerous road works.
"
Engineers are continuing to work on the fibre break.
The work is currently being delayed by numerous road works.
"
More likely that the work was *caused* by one of the numerous road works.
Also from the link you gave ... "Fibre spicing engineers have arrived at the site and will begin work shortly."
Hopefully they have brought the correct mix of spices. Curry usually provides a very fast throughput.
Also from the link you gave ... "Fibre spicing engineers have arrived at the site and will begin work shortly."Hopefully they have brought the correct mix of spices. Curry usually provides a very fast throughput.
LOL, a virtual pint to go with your curry
So... twenty quid (or thereabouts) a month for broadband. If down for 24 hours that makes the compensation...
** thrum of fingers on calculator **
** number mumbles and minor under-breath curses **
** dawning realisation **
... about sixty-six shiny new pence, depending on how many days there are in the month. If you include phone line rental as well then you might be up to a quid twenty-five or so. Awesome!
Halve those numbers if you blagged Sky Broadband for only a tenner... :-)
/Anon
(b/c not admitting to having Sky).
The picture quality was superb on the UHD player channel. The grass was so realistic it affected my hay fever and you could positively feel the England supported anguish until the last gasp goal.
Sure. the picture crapped out a couple of times, but apart from that it was far superior to HD.
"The timing is unfortunate, with streaming services such as iPlayer piloting 4K viewing of England's football shenanigans."
Well, what do you expect if world + dog is trying to watch a football at the same time in 4K. That's a fuck-ton of bandwidth.
Live TV over the internet is a really seriously fucking dumb idea. THAT'S WHAT TV MASTS ARE FOR. They can transmit to literally millions of people AT THE SAME TIME.
I know. Incredible isn't it?
Stop clogging the intertubes with football FFS. People are missing their Facebook and Twatter. Won't SOMEBODY think of them?
Where's the HUMANITY?
Live TV over the internet is a really seriously fucking dumb idea. THAT'S WHAT TV MASTS ARE FOR. They can transmit to literally millions of people AT THE SAME TIME.
In some alternative universe, where they invented an internet first, there is probably some geek being hailed a genius for figuring out how much money and bandwidth could be saved by having a single point transmission system to millions, raised on to a pedestal for realising whole continents could be served by a single satellite.
I don't mind. I don't watch much football and when I do it's on the TV. That gives me two hours of downloading 4K movie rips so they're ready to go when the game's over. That means less inconvenience for me :)
"there is probably some geek being hailed a genius for figuring out how much money and bandwidth could be saved by having a single point transmission system to millions"
Umm, it's called UDP and supports unicast, broadcast, multicast and anycast. Granted it's only real use online is with gaming, but the technology has been around for decades to do this. Norton Ghost even used it to image multiple PCs simultaneously and that was back in the 90's.
Have we really been so brainwashed by "cloud" that we've forgotten about the actual technology powering it?
I find that the delivery of such sporting commentary is still more than adequate on the Light program. Plus, at the same time, I can starch my collars for work and darn half a dozen pairs of socks, all under the watchful gaze of Binny the cat, who will be soaking up the last glimmers of warmth from the range. For an extra treat on such occasions as a World Cup, I allow myself some extra bottles of chilled ginger ale! Splendid stuff!
This event was actually predicted by The Archers, when the villagers gathered in The Bull suddenly and mysteriously lost the video of the match. Ambridge is, of course, somewhere in the Midlands.
Since the scripts are written and the episodes recorded weeks ahead of time, we must stand amazed at their clairvoyance.
A Sky spokesperson told El Reg: "A builder scored an own goal on us and other service providers by slicing through a main cable yesterday. It was something our engineers needed extra time to fix, just like Harry Kane. They worked through the night and day to restore service for customers but we are now back in the game with services restored to the areas affected. We're sorry for the inconvenience they have experienced."
Oh do fuck off.
If you need compensation when the connection goes down, why use any consumer ISP (Even the best service in the world can't cover you from everything). When I used to work on HellDesk for an ISP, I used think every time as I was being yelled at, if they were losing millions of pounds every second why wouldn't they spend a few hundred pound per month for a connection with backup and an SLA.
Doesn't make much difference. I used to spend much of my life on hold to Sprint. Much to the annoyance of the IT director who imposed the £1,500/month frame relay link on us it managed about 98.5% uptime, whereas the "business" ADSL line for £50/month got 99.95%.
And the ADSL people would answer the phone and fix things, until they got bought by Pipex.
Get a battery operated transistor radio -
693 kHz, 909 kHz, 990 kHz AM
In Cornwall at least.
Because It didn't just affect Cornwall but also parts of Devon, and at first when the internet went off in the evening of Saturday night the status page clearly said it was due to network upgrades being carried out between 10pm and 2am in the morning.
Fair enough. So at 6am Sunday this was the same message and it wasn't until 7pm when the phone line opened that first we were told there no faults, then when I rang back because the automated line cut me off I was then told there was a network issue and the woman wanted me to plug my router into a master socket, move a bookcase to do that so she could test the line and discover no fault my end. Not till later was the message changed from Network upgrades to a fibre cable break, which isn't good enough.
I've said here before, I accept things go wrong, any network not just Sky, but the lack of information is what annoys me.
Apart from any compensation paid, I wonder if there is any loss in revenue due to the drop in viewing figures? It's one of those things, you can't stop a digger going through a fibre if you've done everything possible to warn them of it's location. Hope Amazon are taking note having just purchased a load of Premier League matches..
>All eggs in one basket. Bad idea
It would seem that Sky didn't learn anything about backbone resilience from the 2013 fire [ https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2013/09/major-broadband-outage-northampton-uk-business-park-fire.html ] which took out service across much of Northamptonshire.
What's with these peope thinking they're entitled to compensation for their Internet being down for hours?
My Internet went down for 24h once. I didn't get a penny of compensation.
I'm guessing they're the kind of people who think they're entitled to money for being stuck in a traffic jam on a motorway for a few hours.
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