Major Outage

There has, for the past four days been a major outage in te West Drayton and Uxbridge areas affecting possibly 10,000 users. It has hit PSTN (copper), ADSL, VDSL, private fibres. Most ISPs are affected and it has also compromised some of the mobile networks including O2 and thus even 4g access is not always possible.

BT are being blamed - WRONGLY. Fault lies with Network Rail who failed to check that there were no cable ducts before their contractors started piling and smashed the ducts along with fibre bundles and copper cables.

Estimates to finish and fully restore - BT are now unable to give a time/date and O2 are suggesting the middle of next week. Network Rail who have ultimately inconvenienced maybe 40-50000 do seem to be dragging their heels about helping BT sort the problems.

..... and I wonder if they will stump up for all the compensation claims which will doubtless be flying their way ?

I will certainly be chasing BT and O2 - I have an NBD agreement in place. And hope that BT pass it ALL on to Network Rail and their cons tractors.


O2 have suspended "No Tethering" clauses in may contacts and given me an extra 20GB of data for the next two weeks - but speeds are way way down and it can take 9 or 10 attempts to make a call wit incoming calls going direct to voice mail as the network is busy/overloaded. Base station to base station radio and microwave links are being used however, as numerous sites are affected they still cannot break out close by.

In reply to a post by MHC:

Estimates to finish and fully restore - BT are now unable to give a time/date

OR have been stating 24th October as the ETR, obviously due to the work, it could be later.

Matt

Strangely, sheet steel piling was what I did before my current role !

That was the previous forecast, as of this morning and again thus afternoon they are now refusing/unable to give a forecast date.

Maybe a case of information not being passed through as that was confirmed at just after noon today on an existing linked TR.

Matt

My source has a direct link in to OR - both electronic and person to person.