Loss of service reports

[pctech]

Wasn't designed by a company called Chocolate Teapots was it? 

[exxos]

Not sure if it helps but my internet went off about 7.30 last night, was off until past midnight, was back up at 9am this morning though. I am In uttoxeter / staffordshire. Router was green for ADSL but red for connection to IDnet.

[pctech]

Both links from BT into IDNet went down from 19.20 last night

See http://www.idnet.net/support/status.jsp

[Baz]

any hope of some sort of compo for every one involved.

And I dont just mean the end user

[pctech]

Prob not as it was only down for a relatively short time.

A few years ago a line card failed at my exchange just when I was being upgraded to ADSL Max, it took BT a week to fix it and they closed the fault on their side 2 days after it was reported but luckily the ISP was monitoring my connection and could see I had no sync so they followed it up with BT management.

It came back up on a Saturday so I mailed and asked what they were planning to do to compensate me for the inconvenience, they gave me a free month. 

I only moved from them as their network was becoming more and more congested at peak times.

[Rik]

I have to agree, Mitch. Inconvenient as it was, a six-hour outage probably isn't going to get much, if any, compensation. The most important things for IDNet right now are finding out how this could have happened and then how it can be prevented from happening again.

[pctech]

Diverse feeds from separate BT kit might be a start.

[Rik]

That would bump costs sky high, though.

[pctech]

Would of thought it would be standard when provisioning these type of connections otherwise it makes having the backup a bit redundant.

[Rik]

BT don't plan for failure. That they achieve it regularly is to be commended, therefore. 

[kinmel]

When I log into my Idnet account page the latest status message reads..........  IDNet Notification

2010-10-10 20:21:Announcement - Both our Primary and Backup Broadband links into BT are currently down. BT are aware of the failure and are investigating. We do not as yet have a time estimate from them for a fix. We will provide an update as soon as we get one.

Not very accurate.

[Rik]

It will be soon.

[Baz]

I have to agree, Mitch. Inconvenient as it was, a six-hour outage probably isn't going to get much, if any, compensation. The most important things for IDNet right now are finding out how this could have happened and then how it can be prevented from happening again.

true yes but 6 hour outage for how many customers for IDNet? soon mounts up.If BT get away with it for the same amount of time/people again.


they have every one by the balls really

[Rik]

Well, by my reckoning, the compensation - assuming it was purely a refund of the downtime - would work out at 10-20p/head, Baz.

[pctech]

I think if your connectivity is critical to your business it is probably best to have two ADSL links if possible (one BT based and one LLU) to give you a little insurance.

[JohnH]

Well, by my reckoning, the compensation - assuming it was purely a refund of the downtime - would work out at 10-20p/head, Baz.

Have BT provided any reason for the outage of both links?

[DorsetBoy]

Have BT provided any reason for the outage of both links?

Network Status2010-10-11 08:10: BT have admitted that someone removed the configuration for our circuits yesterday. We and demanded that they investigate why this happened, what safeguards will now be put in place to ensure that it can't happen again and why it took them so long to resolve the issue.
2010-10-11 01:46: Service has now been restored. We are demanding a full explanation from BT.
2010-10-10 23:59: BT confirm both circuits tested OK. They are now diagnosing their internal network routing.
2010-10-10 22:18: BT now have engineers onsite in the Exchange diagnosing the problem.
2010-10-10 20:21: Both our Primary and Backup Broadband links into BT are currently down. BT are aware of the failure and are investigating. We do not as yet have a time estimate from them for a fix. We will provide an update as soon as we get one.

[JohnH]

Thanks. I was looking for something in 'Service Announcements' but all it says there is that service has been restored and an explanation demanded.

I have to admit that when it went down last night and I was trying to access via Blackberry, I didn't know exactly where to look. It would be good if this could be clearly defined for the future.

[Niall]

I think the safeguard would be to fire whoever doesn't know how to do their job, that caused this in the first place.

[Simon]

I have to admit that when it went down last night and I was trying to access via Blackberry, I didn't know exactly where to look. It would be good if this could be clearly defined for the future.

Simon (from IDNet) posted under Service Announcements, and we did put the news banner up, but you may not have seen that if accessing using the wap interface, John.  As is the nature of these events, information does tend to get fragmented over different threads, but we did try to keep all of the relevant information in the one or two threads.  Any ideas on how this could be done better would be more than happily received. 

[JohnH]

When the outage first happened, the first thing I did was to check all my own kit and even swapped the router just in case.
At this stage, I was still unsure whether it was a local outage or something more far-reaching.

Via Blackberry, I went to the logical place on Netters - 'Service Announcements' but found it difficult because of the large number of threads (remembering that the screen size is minimal).

I did eventually find the BT Service Outage notice, but it did not have a date on it and only the outage time of 19:20 gave me the clue that this was indeed the one I was experiencing. I do think it would be good if all the legacy service threads could be removed (most of which are locked anyway, which is difficult to decipher on a BB) and that a date be put alongside current thread titles in this section.

By the way, when you log into the portal, it is still showing that an outage is under way.

I know all of this depends on the goodwill and hard work of you admin guys, so please don't take it the wrong way.
I am full of admiration for what you do. 

[armadillo]

For me, by far the most important place to find the outage report is in a recorded message on the Technical Support phone number. Indeed, idnet management did put a message there and I am grateful for that. If the idnet service is down, I have no other means of accessing the internet (without driving 15 miles to the nearest internet cafe!). I have no blackberry, no dial up modem and no WAP access. A quick call to the tech support number was all I needed to hear the recorded message. I had done a quick check of my router but hearing the support message stopped me making unnecessary changes. I only phoned the support line once, after the service had been down for about two hours. But I would hope that the message was recorded as soon as management were aware of a problem. It would be helpful to update such messages with an estimate of time to fix, if this is available. I appreciate that, in this case, no such estimate was available.

This forum, the service status page and my own portal login are where I come after service is resumed to look for a more detailed explanation of the problem.

[JohnH]

I have to confess that I did not have the support number handy and didn't think to look it up on their website via BB. 

[armadillo]

I have all support numbers in my email client's address book. I go there to find the email address, phone number and anything else that might be useful, like service hours.

[Lance]

welcome to the forum, armadillo.