The joy of single provider service. British Telecom lost most of its national IP backbone on Tuesday affecting DSL and Dialup service across multiple ISPs in the UK. According to news reports, this affected almost all DSL service in the UK. What happened to BT? Is this a unique "feature" of the UK marketplace or can the same thing happen in the USA?
Sean,
The joy of single provider service. British Telecom lost most of its national IP backbone on Tuesday affecting DSL and Dialup service across multiple ISPs in the UK. According to news reports, this affected almost all DSL service in the UK.
What happened to BT? Is this a unique "feature" of the UK marketplace or can the same thing happen in the USA?
Their Columbus IP network melted for 6 hours. No real explanation given yet. One rumour is 'power failure' (how that takes out a supposedly redundant network with multiple sites is left as an exercize for the reader). One press reported quoted BT as saying it would take several days for BT to be able to give a full picture of what went wrong - place your own interpretation on that. It is /possible/ to provide DSL without using BT's IP backbone, but very expensive in terms of initial Capex costs. This ridiculousness is not duplicated in the US. I suspect it is not restricted to the UK. In the US the systemic problem appears to be non-incumbant DLECs used by many ISPs filing Chapter 11 :-) A side effect of having to buy DSL from BT appears to be that as BT refuses to act on end-user line problems outside business hours, there is little SLA differentiation between DSL ISPs. -- Alex Bligh Personal Capacity
The joy of single provider service. British Telecom lost most of its national IP backbone on Tuesday affecting DSL and Dialup service across multiple ISPs in the UK. According to news reports, this affected almost all DSL service in the UK.
What happened to BT? Is this a unique "feature" of the UK marketplace or can the same thing happen in the USA?
No one will ever know but I'd guess it was self inflicted, it didn't affect all providers though, my partner has DSL via one provider that was not affected, I've got DSL though another provider and that was affected [although the DSL boxes are less than 10 feet apart and go into the same exchange!] The issue in the UK around BT's ownership of the loop will never end as long as we have a government and more importantly a regulator that continues to think that "BT knows best". Regards, Neil.
participants (3)
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Alex Bligh -
neil＠DOMINO.ORG -
Sean Donelan