Background
Reliable information seems difficult to get hold of but from what we know it would appear that there was a major incident causing damage to a BT network tunnel 32 metres below ground in the east of London. At around 2:30 on Saturday afternoon, what BT will only describe as ‘a third party contractor’ working on the Olympic village bored through the network tunnel severing fibre optic and copper cables. [Note that more recent reports have identified BT Openreach as the 'third party contractor'.]
Impact
The damaged main data artery immediately affected vital services such as mobile phone cell sites, remote connections to traffic light signals and emergency services. Needless to say, phone and broadband services were also affected.
I am an independant computer services technician working in Lincoln and the surrounding area. I have had dozens of clients call me complaining of their lack of broadband connectivity (their phone services have been unaffected.) Confirmed affected areas that I have had first hand information about include Saxilby, Fiskerton, Sturton-by-Stow, Ingham, Glebe Park, Nettleham and Lincoln city centre.
Some of these clients lost their broadband on Saturday afternoon. This would appear to be a direct result of the incident as you would expect. More interestingly, other users had an uninterrupted service over the weekend but have experienced outages during Monday and today (Tuesday.) This wouild imply that users accross the country are experiencing ‘planned outages’ in order to cope with capacity issues. The problem is that no one is being advised of these planned outages. Some BT reports have even denied that anyone outside of east London is affected.
Comment
Clearly such a huge incident is not going to be repaired overnight. Imagine a colapsed service tunnel 32m below ground. Construction workers will have to gain access, make safe and repair the area before any access can be granted to telecom engineers. Once the engineers get on site the repair job is still mamouth. In the mean time it would appear that the data can be re-routed. But at what expense? The capcity appears to be being borrowed from domestic users from what I can see.
If you have been affected by this issue then please leave a message detailing the extent of your outage and the ISP that you use. Most of my clients use Tiscali Broadband but what about you? What are you doing about it? Will you expect to receive compensation from your ISP?
Update (Wednesday morning)
I have just been in touch with my contacts at Tiscali to try and get some more info. The quote from their technical team is as follows:
“We identified a further issue yesterday morning (Tuesday) relating to the BT outage, there is a further two STM-4 (622Mbps) IPStream pipes down which is around 15% of our (Tiscali’s) overall IPStream capacity so this will be causing some customers to be without service across the UK. BT are working on resolving these two breaks but as there is 1186 cables to be repaired it won’t be a quick fix.”
It’s nice to be told ‘something’ but it begs more questions than it answers.
Update (Good Friday)
There are a couple of photos on Flickr now. The big orange thing is the boring machine cutting through the cable tunnel. Actually it’s a much tidier job than I’d imagined! Still, it’s had a huge impact on our broadbnad service. (Note that I have no way of telling whether these photos genuinely releate to this issue.)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/23919135@N00/
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