A tale of 2 BE's - not impressed !

Yesterday morning (17/7) there was a BE outage which affected a wide area around Peterborough. Because I have both a BE Pro service direct from BE, and an AAISP Business service supplied via BE, I was hit twice, although the symptoms were slightly different on the two services. The BE Pro service continued to function, albeit sporadically, whilst the AAISP-supplied service had my router reporting "Unable to connect to the PPPoE server", so no connectivity at all. The connection graphs on the AAISP site showed the connection starting to fail at 03:30, running sporadically for a few hours, before being completely out by 09:30.

What shocked and surprised me was how the two companies handled the outage. BE sent me a text message at 09:18, saying that there was an issue with my broadband, giving me an 0808 number to ring for more details. When I rang, there was a recording saying that there was an outage affecting a large area in and around Peterborough. They also sent an email at 09:07, giving similar details, which I was able to pick up on my smart phone.

With AAISP, the experience was somewhat different. As I said earlier, my first inkling that there was something wrong was that my router was reporting that it could not get a response from the PPPoE server. The text message that I used to get when I got my AAISP service via BT doesn't seem to work when you get your service via BE, which is a real problem, because part of my security system relies on a working broadband connection.

Using my faltering BE Pro connection, I managed to log on to my AAISP portal, which confirmed that the problem had started at 03:30, but there was no indication on the AAISP site to say that there was a problem on the BE service. However, on the AAISP site, it did give a phone number where faults affecting a wide area could be reported, so I sent them a text message.

AAISP replied to my text very promptly, saying that they would look into it. They reset my SNR margin to 9dB, and re-booted the router, which had no effect at all. They then got back to me saying that they could find no evidence of an area fault, and that it appeared that it was affecting my line only. I then had to tell them about my second line and BE's email text message, and the message on their Faults Reporting line (not an easy thing to do on a text message on a phone), and they said they would look into it again, and (to their credit), they later apologised and admitted that it was an area fault.

Now, I am a great fan of AAISP, and they did a lot to help me when I had severe line problems, but after this episode I am left wondering why I am paying AAISP nearly double what I pay BE ?

Edited by deleted (Sun 18-Jul-10 10:56:37)

Hi Zebedeee,

Firstly sorry about the problems with your line.

We received your SMS and initially it looked at the line and upon first look it looked like it was just your line - it was only after that we noticed it was others too.

Our status post (http://status.aa.nu/?incident=341) was eventually published at 11:49.

To improve BE Planned work and Emergency work notices to our customers we will look in to automating this.