That may explain why Spotify was a bit sticky this afternoon up in Scotland :)
Major London problem hits BT broadband across southeast
BT is struggling to get its broadband service up and running in parts of the capital and across the southeast of England this afternoon, after the telecoms giant was hit by a massive outage. The company has coughed to a "serious incident" and is currently broadcasting its woes on Twitter. BT is in fact fielding messages from …
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Thursday 21st June 2012 13:44 GMT xyz
Forget the broadband, BT please fix the grammar
From BT's site
Dialling codes affected: 0203, 0207, 0208
We're really sorry but we've got a problem at the moment in the London and surronding area's, which means that some of our customers will be having trouble getting online. We're trying to fix the problem as quickly as we can.
The HORROR!!!! >>>area's<<<<
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Thursday 21st June 2012 14:10 GMT Chris Miller
Re: Forget the broadband, BT please fix the grammar
Muphry's Law strikes again!
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Friday 22nd June 2012 08:58 GMT William Gallafent
Re: Forget the broadband, BT please fix the grammar
“Do you really think the whole of London is on one exchange and uses the code 020?”
Nobody mentioned exchange's, and nobody suggested that. The dialling code is 020. If I'm calling from the line 020 7123 4567, and I dial 8765 4321, the call will get through to the number 020 8765 4321. If my dialling code is not 020, then I need to use the dialling code 020. There are many more exchanges than three in London, the 7, 8 and 3 correspond broadly to inner London, outer London and "new numbers because we ran out of 7 (or 8) prefix numbers on this exchange. Each exchange provides (I think) numbers that start (020 7 (and sometimes 020 3)) or (020 8 (and sometimes 020 3)). And so on.
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Friday 22nd June 2012 10:24 GMT Ragarath
Re: Forget the broadband, BT please fix the grammar
It means nothing that they have aggreated the the code 020 to just mean London and therefore any call originating in this aggreated zone need not use 020. For example the code +44 means the whole of the UK to the rest of the world.
The exchanges (what matter) have a dialling code associated with them. This is 020XX that is the dialling code. I know Londoners think they are special, but your not. You phones work the same as the rest of the UK.
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Tuesday 26th June 2012 08:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Forget the broadband, BT please fix the grammar
"This is 020XX that is the dialling code"
No it isn't. London is a former director area (along with Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester and so on...) Those cities have codes in a different format.
The telephone number is made up of a city code, an exchange code and then the telephone number.
London codes are absolutely not 020xx - dialling codes in former director areas ARE special - they don't work the same as the rest of the UK. The history of STD is too complicated and uninteresting to go into here (wiki it if you're bothered) but the way numbers work and what they technically mean (a telephone number being a device address) is different in these cities.
BT made a technical error in the way they described these codes, but they adopted a format that I expect most people are familiar with. This misunderstanding has come about due to the previous London codes that genuinely were 0171 and 0181 - there was a direct translation from 0171 to 020 7 and from 0181 to 020 8, hence the confusion.
Finally, there's an Ofcom proposal to remove local dialling from London and some other cities. This is because overlay dialling codes are not geographically distinct and the likely result is wrong numbers being called. Increasingly people dial full numbers anyway, driven by the rise of the mobile phone. I don't know if this proposal has gone ahead yet or has even been approved, but logically it must happen.
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Friday 22nd June 2012 15:40 GMT David Beck
Re: Forget the broadband, BT please fix the numbers
Yes and BT are complete idiots regarding these allocations. When I lived in London my first number was 845x xxxx, guess what happened on a regular basis. Not only that but the specific 0845 number was allocated to a company who called parents to report a kid not in school. We were reported to the police regularly for making "spamming" phone calls. After the first few times the woman who did the phone stuff for the Met knew us and just binned the complaints. BT's position was, tough, if you don't like it you can have another 845 number. They could have but refused to tell the company using the 0845 number to not put a number in the CLI field as their number was out-going only anyway.
Note for the pedantic among you, yes the 0845 number would have an additional final digit, which if you fail to dial the "0" is ignored, the resulting number was the 8 digits of my London number. Well designed BT, "useless" is the kindest thing I can say.
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Thursday 21st June 2012 15:58 GMT Anonymous John
Re: Three
I love Three's Customer Service.
"I'm getting DNS look-up failures on all but a few websites. All other Internet apps are normal".
"There's a mast down at XXX. Are you anywhere near that?"
"No, and it wouldn't cause this problem."
"Have you turned the phone off and on?"
"Yes, but it wouldn't cause this problem."
"Take out the SIM and give the contacts a rub."
Where's the headbang icon?
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Thursday 21st June 2012 13:55 GMT Lee Dowling
And, in a typical display of cosmic karma, the dual-ADSL2+ connections that my workplace runs on a load-balancing / failover system for which we have SMS-controlled remote hard-rebooting of the routers, because the connection (not the routers) is SO unreliable we need that just to stay online for most of the day even though we're only FEET from the main town exchange in a London suburb - it's working fine, and has been all day.
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Thursday 21st June 2012 15:22 GMT theblackhand
Re: Never mind the grammar
This was my fault - when fixing some equipment, I ended up with a left over screw and now some of the Internet is spilling onto the floor.
I'm just on a train at present, but will get back to the office later today with the missing screw.
Unless, of course, you are out when I call.
Mr B T Engineer
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Thursday 21st June 2012 14:22 GMT Gti Jazz Blue
FARADAY again
Well if it is FARADAY again it is the third major failure recently, even effected us down on the South Coast.
Wrote to my MP last time asking if BT are a competent enough supplier, he still hasn't had a response from the Minister responsible (Ed Vaizey). So emailed him and reminded him and pointed out the failure again today.
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Thursday 21st June 2012 14:28 GMT James 100
To be fair, it's sometimes depressing how often "turn it off and on again" fixes things.
Early last year, I had an escalated broadband fault. Sync was fine, VP and VC were right, the cells just weren't getting where they needed to. I power-cycled the router as requested, just to be sure - still no luck. "Have you tried power cycling the line card?"
"Nope, that wouldn't help anyway, I'm sure"
Some time later, everything started working. Message came back "it did."
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Thursday 21st June 2012 15:43 GMT Gti Jazz Blue
Re: Key word here is "Redundancy".
You build redundancy into the set up of the exchange, it's systems and environment, then short of the actual building failing (falling down etc) the network should continue to function.
BT have a major responsibility due to their almost monopoly on the infrastructure used by many. They need to live up to that responsibility.
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Friday 22nd June 2012 08:16 GMT sabba
Re: Key word here is "Redundancy".
Surely, in this context, redundancy is not about having too much of something but having just the right amount. In the case of systems / processes, resilience ('the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties') is often provided **through** redundancy ('the inclusion of extra components that are not strictly necessary to functioning, in case of failure in other components').
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Thursday 21st June 2012 23:51 GMT Chads
Re: I'm on VM
Never had any problem with VM myself, however I did have difficulty responding to a telephone survey the other day. The question was 'would you recommend VM to a friend?' The response was along the lines of:
If it's the ex-Telewest network then Yes
If it's the ex-NTL network then probably not
If it's unbundled BT circuits then all bets are off
Strangely the survey-droid couldn't cope with this and asked the question again
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Thursday 21st June 2012 18:10 GMT Tringle
QED
Thus proving for all those who haven't quite got it yet that any enterprise that relies on 'the cloud' (aka cloud cuckoo land) for essential or important services is foolishly vulnerable potentially capricious and often unreliable 3rd parties.
The 'cloud' might be cheaper than keeping everything in house - and there's a reason for that, it's because it's cr*p.
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Thursday 21st June 2012 22:30 GMT Gti Jazz Blue
Odd issue too
The odd thing is that there was some packet traffic OK - I could ping the DNS servers at our ISP and the OpenDNS ones but couldn't do a lookup using them.
Our ISP initially stated that it was an Authentication issue, though the routers on both of my circuits effected showed that they were fine and authenticated.
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Thursday 21st June 2012 22:30 GMT drizzy
BT's routing
The outage in the southwest (Bristol/Truro) and London is very likely to be related to Sheffield. I am in southwest London and my traffic is routed to Sheffield before coming back to London and the wider internet (adding a needless 15ms latency). I've seen evidence from a couple of others (at least one in west London, one in Somerset) that they are also routed via Sheffield. It's like everyone south and west of a certain point in London gets routed via Sheffield.
I suspect it is highly likely that the two are linked!
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Friday 22nd June 2012 09:09 GMT Sirius Lee
Not the first time
When my BT internet connection stopped working yesterday I just switched the modem off and on again. It's not something BT needed to tell me because it happens twice a week every week. My hope is that there really is some underlying problem that, because of its huge impact this time, will be fixed for good now.