How furtunate...
That they will now undoubtedly be able to lodge a substantial insurance claim and replace the kit before their main competitor Everything Everywhere get their shiny new upgrades from Huawei...
O2's ongoing outage was down to a well-organised theft of networking kit, which engineers are struggling to replace while promising to connect customers by close of play. O2 customers in North and East London, Sussex and Kent are still without service following a break-in at one of the operator's unmanned sites. While clearly …
You need to look east of the EU-ex-CIS border towards the region where "engineering language" contains a lot of "p*zda" and "huj" for where the kit went.
That is more or less the only place it goes in cases like this.
They have the need for the kit and the _ABILITY_ to run it without support contract. The vendor software license police and vendor support contracts which _ALL_ UK (and EU) telecoms operators take makes using stolen proper telco kit practically impossible.
That is also why kit stolen this way usually goes East instead of going LatAm or Africa as that is the only place where they have enough qualified people who do not work for a vendor, do not care where the kit came from and can run it and even modify it if necessary.
Anon. For obvious reasons.
All the victims in these thefts have a vested interest in making it appear that they were turned over by master criminals or specialists, as this (somehow) reduces the burden of blame on them for having lax security and no failover/backup system.
However, it's just as likely that the stuff was nicked by a casual thief with a hookey transit and a crow-bar, and the "swag" will end up on eBay or down the scrappy for the however-many pounds per ton that gash electronics fetches these days. Obviously that doesn't put the £billion telco in such a good light, when anyone can break into their critical network hubs and knock their services offline for a considerable period.
Presumably if this had happened during Obama's visit next week it would be counted as a terrorist atrocity, or the conspiracy nuts would be having a field day with it. Maybe they still will?
I remember a spate of similar thefts of Sun kit around the year 2000. The wrong-uns would steal the processor/memory and I/O boards from running E3500/4500/6500 systems - as there were no machine readable serial numbers inside, they could be used in any unpopulated system chassis. I'm guessing there were plenty of empty base units sold in the target territories. The advanced version, used in one particularly large heist, was to leave just enough hardware that the system would reboot and come up, but with little capacity.
I'd be interested to know the make and generation of kit which disappeared here. Still, I supposed it makes a change from the trains being late because the copper in the signalling system was stolen.
I was on the site last week and the targeted piece of kit takes 6months to be custom made.. The buyers will likely be from Russia and the Kit will be used to steal identities and hack into UK mainframes. These sites have 1 engineer and they are unmarked "unknown" sites. Security is very lapse considering the £billions of technical equipment on site and the £100'smillions of cost of downtime.
Someone mentioned obama and terrorism, forget obama, surely this is a form of terrorism anyway as the theft and vandalism impacts so many people? Maybe if the government would "man up" and treat crimes like these appropriately rather than giving it to the local CID Detective Sergeant to add to his long list of burglaries (as happened in the Vodafone incident, still no arrests) the punishment would fit the crime and the turds responsible would actually get nicked and serve some appropriate time..
(Fail because that's what I think of almost 3 months since the Vodafone break in and no arrests to speak of)
Not in the industry, but my understanding was that remote mobile locations had monitored alarms and even cctv. Obviously pretty slack on the security. How long did it take to notice??? Were they asleep at the network operations centre?
Seems to be a lot of basic unanswered questions here, and the O2 pr department has put a bit of spin on it to deflect this.
It seems suprising that O2 (and presumably others) don't have an emergency roaming agreement with other operators for this sort of problem. Maybe it's a capacity problem, but surely the another operators could take the O2 load between them in return for some cash. I imagine it could even be transparent to end-users in the way Three phones use Orange when there is no Three coverage, yet the phone still shows the operator as Three.
SIMs have a so-called "prohibited network list". The original idea was to make sure that mobiles from other networks in the same country do not eat your signalling capacity by trying to sign up to your network.
In any case, all SIMs from Voda, O2 have each other and Orange as prohibited. You cannot make these roam without replacing the SIM or editing the list which on most phones cannot be done over the air. I do not know where does TOrange stand on that (been a while since I have done GSM). 3 probably does not have a list or it has only some of other operators as it has to roam onto 2G sometimes.
As far as mandatory roaming that is a jolly good idea. However every time this has been put in front of OfCom it has gotten nowhere. The underlying reason is that mandatory roaming implies interconnect tariffs which make calling any network or data from/to any network equal. This will give a non-discriminatory position to any new entrant. They can start with partial coverage and if the roaming is mandatory and non-discriminatory they can operate an offering. That is simply not going to happen and the mobiles have a point there because they used to have coverage covenants on their license.