Businesses across London have been suffering for the past few days with no communications following a tunnel borer cutting through a major BT trunk at the Olympic site. The fault has affected roughly 70,000 services, with 50,000 coming back online this morning.
What was interesting was who and what was affected. Leased line fibre customers to home DSL and telephone networks were disrupted. Those of you who drive will have been affected by increased levels of traffic over the weekend as TFL wasn’t able to communicate with the signals and hence they got out of phase causing gridlock across London.
From our perspective it was an excellent demonstration of our service and our focus on robust, independent failover solutions. Out of our entire customer base only two were affected, while the rest were able to continue to work oblivious to the fact that their main fibre link had been taken down. It is a good testament to how DSL on the backhaul can properly mesh and how, no matter how good an SLA is, you can always suffer a fault.
My brother works in a largish (1000+ staff) office in the west end and they were without internet communication until 3pm today – just think a bit of extra investment a year ago and all those staff could have been a lot more productive today.
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