Outage in East Sussex

Sky broadband and (incoming & outgoing) calls have been out for the whole of the East Sussex coast since 3pm yesterday: https://servicestatus.sky.com/#/uk/issues - over 20 hours now. It's affected major towns like Hastings and Eastbourne as well as lots of smaller towns.

Apparently someone dug through a single cable/duct.

Perhaps it's time ISPs and infrastructure providers are mandated to provide adequate resiliency to provide fail-over in such situations?

Edited by Oliver341 (Thu 06-Jul-17 11:39:41)

In reply to a post by Oliver341:

Sky broadband and (incoming & outgoing) calls have been out for the whole of the East Sussex coast since 3pm yesterday: https://servicestatus.sky.com/#/uk/issues - over 20 hours now. It's affected major towns like Hastings and Eastbourne as well as lots of smaller towns.

Apparently someone dug through a single cable/duct.

Perhaps it's time ISPs and infrastructure providers are mandated to provide adequate resiliency to provide fail-over in such situations?

Not when people are wanting to pay a fiver a month for unlimited broadband.

Not when people are wanting to pay a fiver a month for unlimited broadband.

+1

And who will be blamed by the press? Almost certainly not the actual culprits.


in my area, BT lost ten of thousands of voice , ADSL and VDSL circuits along with large numbers of fibre links which affected O2, Vodafone, Three, EE and many others. Yes, some had backup routes but they were over loaded ...

Who did the press criticise and where was all the flak directed? yes, at BT and not at Network Rail who could no be bothered to confirm the exact location of a know BT duct and put a 450mm auger straight into it, taking of all the connections.

You cannot account for cowboys and their actions! As already said - additional resilience can be built in, but would you pay extra on your phone line rental, broadband connection and mobile phone to cover the cost?

There has been a lot of damaged cables affecting multiple services and CPs. I expect they will be working into this evening and beyond

In reply to a post by MHC:

You cannot account for cowboys and their actions! As already said - additional resilience can be built in, but would you pay extra on your phone line rental, broadband connection and mobile phone to cover the cost?

Given how critical these services are to people, that's a discussion worth having. Especially when incoming and outgoing calls are knocked out for elderly/vulnerable people who may not have adapted well to mobile communication devices.

Sadly most people will not appreciate the importance of network resilience until they are affected, at which point they may well recognise the importance of paying a bit more for a service with more reliability.

It's back up now (for me), the downtime was 23 hours.

Edited by Oliver341 (Thu 06-Jul-17 16:28:58)

OFCOM are not interested and I would suggest 99% of people would say no as soon as a cost was mentioned.

Would I pay £1 extra on my line rental, £1 on broadband and 50p on each mobile account each month? Probably yes ...

And you are lucky at 23 hours - the outage here was around 5 days for me as a business user and up to 10 days for others.

In reply to a post by MHC:

OFCOM are not interested and I would suggest 99% of people would say no as soon as a cost was mentioned.

It's a shame OFCOM isn't interested, personally I think a situation where hundreds of thousands of customers can be disconnected from their phone and broadband services for a day (or days in your case) by a single point of failure shouldn't be tolerated in 2017. Regulations increase prices across many industries, but that doesn't mean the regulations should be scrapped if they have value.

In reply to a post by Oliver341:

It's a shame OFCOM isn't interested, personally I think a situation where hundreds of thousands of customers can be disconnected from their phone and broadband services for a day (or days in your case) by a single point of failure shouldn't be tolerated in 2017.

Problem is you are not living in the real world. Breakdowns, cable damage, equipment failures occur on a daily basis across the country. And how much duplication do you want. At some point they get close to one another - just look at Apollo 13. Have you the cash to pay for all the additional wiring, ducting etc etc. required for zero day?

What are your back up plans? Probably nil. Like so many other people.

My back up plans? If the internet goes down it would be a connection to the mobile network. It wouldn't be ideal but as a get around, it would work for me. Of course, if the power goes off, well I could go get a mobile generator too but that would be a cost just for the odd occasion and a bit overkill - probably wouldn't start when wanted anyway. I could live without the internet for a few days without too much hassle, power maybe not. For cooking and hot water I need electricity. I'd also get bored cooking off a gas ring bought for camping!

And no, I don't want to pay any more for my internet.

In reply to a post by Oliver341:

Given how critical these services are to people, that's a discussion worth having.

Which services are the critical ones?

Ofcom are somewhat interested, and place some requirements on a telco:

In reference to www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0021/36192/general_conditio...:

General condition 3 is "PROPER AND EFFECTIVE FUNCTIONING OF THE NETWORK", and specifies:

�The Communications Provider shall take all necessary measures to maintain, to the greatest extent possible:

(a) the proper and effective functioning of the Public Communications Network provided by it at all times, and

(b) in the event of catastrophic network breakdown or in cases of force majeure the fullest possible availability of the Public Communications Network and Publicly Available Telephone Services provided by it, and

(c) uninterrupted access to Emergency Organisations as part of any Publicly Available Telephone Services offered.�

That's for voice, though, not data.

So the intention is that a telco has to keep the voice network running to the fullest possible availability even in catastrophic circumstances or when pleading force majeure.

I'm not convinced that Sky or TalkTalk follow this principle. Not if a fence post can take out the service for 32,000 subscribers.

The last clause is the strongest - making emergency service access (999) available uninterrupted - and is clearly not happening.

I agree that there's a discussion worth having here. Just where does Ofcom draw the line over condition 3?

As you say, though, most people don't appreciate the importance of resilience ... including, it seems, Sky's network planners. Joe Public likely just assumes that Sky and TalkTalk provide the same resilience as BT for voice, and that broadband resilience follows alongside the voice service.