BT suffers huge broadband failure across much of UK • Hacker News Board

Re: BT suffers huge broadband failure across much of UK

#11

Post by n3m3sis » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 3:00 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #9

rlpb wrote: post #4

"Business users were particularly badly affected, with many reporting considerable lost revenue as a result." It's a shame that these businesses that have so much hinging on their Internet connections don't have any kind of backup line arranged.

Getting a second non BT line would probably cost some companies their entire revenue.

Not exactly true, the non-BT option is primarily Virgin. Virgin has a pretty good infrastructure (at home I have 50Mbps broadband from them) and generally they are cheaper. BT on the other hand is more expensive. If available I'm sure businesses would select Virgin. But we (I work for one business that is stuck with BT) have no option but BT because Virgin doesn't have its fibre in our region.

While BT runs over telephone wires. Therefore is more pervasive in the UK.

Re: BT suffers huge broadband failure across much of UK

#12

Post by n3m3sis » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 3:00 PM UTC

toypaj wrote: post #6

makethetick wrote: post #3

Mine was out for 4.5 hours yesterday. They seem to be down playing the outage, the paper this morning mentioned that it was out for only an hour or so. When I spoke to a support guy yesterday he said that 30% of their network was out and this was 4 hours into the outage.

Yeah, I was told by a support guy that between 25-30% of BT users were affected. We managed with iPad 3G with MiWi tethered to iMac via WiFi and then sharing connection from iMac via Ethernet!

We survived with multiple 3-MiFis.

Re: BT suffers huge broadband failure across much of UK

#13

Post by rlpb » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 5:22 PM UTC

n3m3sis wrote: post #10

rlpb wrote: post #4

"Business users were particularly badly affected, with many reporting considerable lost revenue as a result." It's a shame that these businesses that have so much hinging on their Internet connections don't have any kind of backup line arranged.

I work for one of those businesses and we were affected. The reason we didn't have a backup line, is because the other major ISP (Virgin) doesn't have its fibre in our region. Therefore, BT is our only option.

Have you considered 3G

Edit: you could also consider a backup line from an LLU provider. You still have the copper as a single point of failure, and perhaps power at the exchange, but the infrastructure is different.