BT's Recovery Disaster
8:00 AM -- Don't Tier 1 operators have sophisticated disaster recovery plans in place these days? It seems not.
An electrical fault that caused a flood and a fire at a BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA) local exchange in Paddington, West London, on Wednesday, March 31, left tens of thousands of people without voice or broadband connections.
OK, these things happen. What's shocking, though, is that normal service is not due to be resumed until Tuesday, April 6.
See this BBC report for more details.
At a time when BT is facing intense competition from the likes of cable operator Virgin Media Inc. (Nasdaq: VMED) and TalkTalk Telecom, and trying to promote itself as the premier provider of broadband-based service packages, such a lengthy outage runs counter to BT's marketing message, and in a very high-profile way, as the problems have been widely reported in the UK national press, on TV, and on the radio.
For major carriers such as BT, it's a disaster when there's no sign of recovery.
— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading
An electrical fault that caused a flood and a fire at a BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA) local exchange in Paddington, West London, on Wednesday, March 31, left tens of thousands of people without voice or broadband connections.
OK, these things happen. What's shocking, though, is that normal service is not due to be resumed until Tuesday, April 6.
See this BBC report for more details.
At a time when BT is facing intense competition from the likes of cable operator Virgin Media Inc. (Nasdaq: VMED) and TalkTalk Telecom, and trying to promote itself as the premier provider of broadband-based service packages, such a lengthy outage runs counter to BT's marketing message, and in a very high-profile way, as the problems have been widely reported in the UK national press, on TV, and on the radio.
For major carriers such as BT, it's a disaster when there's no sign of recovery.
— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading
Soupafly
12/5/2012 | 4:40:07 PM
re: BT's Recovery Disaster
What a complete load of nonsense, common cents!
Even if all of your statements are correct, it does not take einstein to work out that when your building a robust resilient network you allow for issues.
To route such a volume of traffic through a single node and have limited work-arounds (hence the service degradation) is in 2010 a complete joke.
No-one with half a brain expects anything less from BT, but the comment about they should be commended! Well, when I finished laughing, I felt it my duty to toss such comments into the garbage - where they belong.
I could almost believe you were a troll for the company, were your comments not completely ridiculous... lol!
BT should (according to news reports) be able to restore service by Tuesday, which is stating the obvious!! Openreach should have significantly better systems in place to deal with this type of contingency.
Soups
somedumbPM
12/5/2012 | 4:40:06 PM
re: BT's Recovery Disaster
Sounds like this was at a CO. If so there is not much that could have been done from the technical network design side. If the lines from the houses get cut off, due to a sever or boxes left unpowered due to fire/flood, the backside of the network can throw all the packets it wants, but they will just fall out of the end of the wire to nowhere.Redundancy is in the network, not geographic diverse fiber/copper runs to every house.
bollocks187
12/5/2012 | 4:40:04 PM
re: BT's Recovery Disaster
BT is rubbish there is always an excuse. The fact that they have been the incumbent since time in memorial is really frustrating. They are a real MONOPOLY in the UK and need to be broken.
commsguru
12/5/2012 | 4:40:03 PM
re: BT's Recovery Disaster
Paddington is a key core node to the network and also home to a wide range of LLU equipment as an Openreach handover point to industry. So has been stated before there was probably a whole host of equipment in the exchange managed not only by BT and Openreach but all of the other major CPs as well.
Sounds like one of the dodgy Chinese DSLAMs trying to subvert the network again...
CG.
BT had to pump millions of gallons of water from a basement floor the size of an aircraft hanger 45 meters underground. According to the company, they have now restored all broadband and the majority of other services. Given the scale of what they had to deal with and repair, they haven't done too badly - some 36 hours after the flood happened.
Maybe BT should be applauded rather than criticised? I'm told the issue was created by a third party, and not by BT themselves.