Broadband outage

[#1]

What is the actual problem that's befallen our third world broadband system and managed to take two whole countries worth of subscribers offline in one fell swoop ?
Isn't the Internet supposed to be a lot more resilient than that ?

[#2]

My Router is Sync'ed OK but ATM and PPP is down and Authentication fails.
I called and got a Dial-up 0808 number which I am using just now.
The Telephone message says that it is a BT Problem affecting the North of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. That is a massive failure ad doesn't say much for the resilience of the BT Network

[#3]

It looks like the Edinburgh Node is down. List of exchange codes affected is given on the BT MSO report here. Estimated fix time is currently Saturday 08:00.

[#4]

Hmmm, I wonder how an outage in Edinborough kills most of the internet in London  
I also like these dialing codes

Quote

LLCL0, LLEM0, LLES0, LLLC0, LLLN0, LLLS0, LLMR0, LLND0, LLNE0, LLNI0, LLNS0, LLSD0, LLSL0, LLWE0, LLWM0, LLWS0, NO-VA, To Fo, ToFol

Can I have one?
And I have to agree, for an international networking infrastructure company, a single failure that wipes out perhaps 50% of a countries connectivity for around 16 hours speaks very badly for that company.

[#5]

I have lost broadband as well.
My router has synced fine but no PPP or ATM.
I'm on the Stepps exchange outside Glasgow. Can't see anything on the status page saying there's a problem in western Scotland.
Tried phoning Plus Net but there seems to be a lot of people doing the same, not surprisingly. Will try again in the morning.

[#6]

If I still owned such a thing as a modem I might have done the same.
I suppose I'll just have to wait until the next bulletin on the problem at 7am I think it was when I last looked. That in itself is a damning indictment of the state of the BT network if they can't fix something critical in less than ten hours from first report

[#7]

Quote from: Ravinella

That in itself is a damning indictment of the state of the BT network if they can't fix something critical in less than ten hours from first report

If you mean its in a poor state of repair... then I think not, BT have invested a lot of money into the network and continue to do so, what does seem very poor though is resilience, I just cant imagine why all exchanges don't have multiple independent routing paths, and why critical services are not both redundancy in their prime location (i.e. the prime location is able to deal with failures at the location by having spare capacity at that location) and redundancy at at least one or two other physically separate locations.
On the other hand, designing full network resilience is a LOT harder that it at first seems, and there are always gotcha's that no one predicted... but still BT the monopoly supplier to much of the UK, with a massive international operation and some very clever people working for them, should be one of the best at this, and I just don't think they are.

[#8]

Looks like all my of area was out
not sure what happend.

[#9]

My service came live at around 03:30 (Saturday).

[#10]

No broadband for me from around 7pm last night till It came live around 1am, Girlfriend In another town was exactly the same, Not impressed to say the least.

[#11]

Quote from: Ravinella

If I still owned such a thing as a modem I might have done the same. I suppose I'll just have to wait until the next bulletin on the problem at 7am I think it was when I last looked. That in itself is a damning indictment of the state of the BT network if they can't fix something critical in less than ten hours from first report

What you need to get, (just in case, and useful for laptops) is one of these....
http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?moduleno=221377
I have one, and it works very well....

[#12]

I don't know if this is still the case but telephone networks used to be designed to be highly resilient, being composed of optical fibre rings with 50% spare capacity so that if there was a break in the line or at a node then the traffic was automatically diverted to travel the other way round the ring.  Then the telecoms companies started thinking "What can we do with this 50% spare capacity that is only used in the event of a failure?" so they put the broadband traffic on it!  Thus if there is a fault the broadband traffic get knocked off in order to re-route the telephone traffic.  Hence, I guess, when your broadband is down you can still make a phone call to complain about it!

[#13]

I'm afraid a ring wouldn't rate as resilient in my book two points of failure and you divide the network in two.  Don't forget that IP networks were designed to work in the event of nuclear war where there were many points of failure, but the idea was, so long as some points hadn't failed they would be able to communicate with each other.

[#14]

Just looking at the fault http://usertools.plus.net/exchanges/mso.php?id=30527
Seems that for many its still not resolved, no update even though its 10am, but still no "its fixed" either.  It would seem to mean some parts of the county have been without broadband for 19 hours now 

[#15]

http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1288421537.htm

Quote

20CN Connectivity Issues (64221) - RESOLVED Internet Connectivity Posted on: Saturday 30 October 2010, 07:52 This is an update to the previous postings about problems connecting to the broadband network yesterday. We are glad to advise that service has been restored and customers previously affected by this issue should now be able to connect successfully. If you are unable to get back on-line then please power your broadband equipment off for 10 minutes before trying to reconnect. If this is unsuccessful, please contact the Support Team through the usual channels. We are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. Kind Regards, Jonathon Smith Customer Support

Whoops 

Quote

20CN Connectivity Issues (64221) - RE-OPENED Internet Connectivity Posted on: Saturday 30 October 2010, 09:49 It has become apparent that the issue we had previously reported as fixed, is still ongoing. Our suppliers are still working on this problem and we hope to have it resolved shortly. For details of this outage please see the following page: http://usertools.plus.net/exchanges/mso.php?id=30527 Updates will be posted when they are available. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause. Kind regards, Jonathon Smith Customer Support