back to article BT's great hole of Ilford still causing grief

BT is still working to fix problems created by a tunnelling machine which crashed through one of its deep level tunnels cutting fibre optic and copper lines early on Saturday afternoon. The large thrust borer was being operated on behalf of Thames Water - the utility said its machine hit "an uncharted obstruction" later …

COMMENTS

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  1. Oliver Mayes

    its machine hit "an uncharted obstruction" later identified as part of BT's network

    Are we sure it wasn't one of its call centers that was hit? Last I heard they were both uncharted and extremely obstructive.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    serious ballsup

    I hear from a big bt customer 1836 fibres were broken. That's a lot of re-routing and splicing. Looks like there have been serious congestion problems caused by the routing of traffic around the links.

  3. Narcolepsy
    Coat

    it's not uncharted......

    ....you lost the charts.

    she looks like a steak-house but handles like a bistro!

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    so

    Maybe someone in BT will learn that "redundancy" doesn't just mean "more lay-offs". Although lack of it could well result in some staff reductions...

  5. Russell Howe
    Boffin

    Quite a few details on Entanet's NOC pages

    http://noc.enta.net/2009/04/outage-framestream-leased-lines/#comments

  6. Harry
    Alert

    Does that mean FASTER journeys ?

    "Transport for London was facing its third day without central control of traffic lights"

    Wasn't Ken's overhyped central control intended to deliberately create delays so he could justify the need for a congestion charge?

    There's only one thing that should be controlling traffic lights -- and that's density of traffic, not overpaid officers.

    Before we had CENTRAL control, you could drive up to traffic lights at an otherwise deserted junction and they would turn green immediately. These days, they just carry on showing green to whichever road has no traffic.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    The Best things

    For London traffic have always been bus strikes and dead traffic lights.

    Drivers are, simply, better at it than traffic lights!

  8. Buzzby
    Black Helicopters

    Redundancy

    BT has lots of redundancy. What is the customer paying for? Redundancy costs money, so beancountered out ok!

  9. adam
    Paris Hilton

    LOL

    "BT War Room" ;)

    Does anyone live nearby who can take some pics of the action ?

    Paris, well, cos she is well connected, even when tunnel bored ;p

  10. Paulie Gaulteri
    Paris Hilton

    Redundancy

    So where do you get proper redundancy for you lines that don't involve BT?

  11. Jon Hurst

    Redundancy

    I work for Urban Wimax who provide symmetrical business connections of up to 10mb over Microwave, completely separated from BT's infrastructure. Whilst I do feel sorry for businesses who have lost money due to this outage it really is time that resilient data connections are taken seriously, and not just seen as an extra cost to businesses. I think this proves the case very well that as soon as your phone line or internet connection leaves your building you really don't know where it goes or who has access to it.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @ Harry

    Actually Harry you don't quite understand how the traffic management works.

    The flow is restricted on the periphery to increasingly limit the density of vehicles as the nominal "centre" is approached. If the centre becomes congested then the periphery seizes too and you get gridlock. This is true of traffic management schemes the world over - vehicles coming in are throttled and vehicles leaving are assisted.

    Do some maths (hint : Pi helps here) and work out the relationship between available road space, how many vehicles can be accomodated before an equivalent density is reached and the resultant traffic flows that occur as you move from the centre to the periphery. Then you'll understand why the lights work as they do.

    It's not actually a million miles different from traffic management in hub and spoke networks. With, I guess, out of town shopping centres acting as mirrors.

  13. Jon Hurst

    Redundancy

    In response to Paulie Gaulteri's question. If you're in London you may be in our coverage area, Urban Wimax provide symmetrical data connections up to 10mb, over microwave. We don't touch BT's network and hence get rid of the risk of a localised point of failure from roadworks or Exchange failure.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Re: Quite a few details on Entanet's NOC pages

    Interesting to see they still have services out. Entanet clearly don't have a great relationship with BT has other major service providers I know had their services fixed as a priority days ago...

  15. Andrew Dancy
    Stop

    Pics of the damage

    Apparently pics of the damage can be seen here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/23919135@N00

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    I just chuckled about

    How we bored all the way to france without much mishap under a private company, yet a public utility cant go a mile without chaos.

    Unchartered? it's a 6 foot diameter tunnel, you cant sneak one of them into the city without being spotted!!!

    The whole olympics will be another labour fiasco, people have forgotten the £8Billion (sorry, 1 billion estimated total build cost) and rising dome already. Olympics for 4 billion? using dome calculations, try £30 Billion end result

    On top of that London council tax payers (the 40% of londoners NOT on benefits) will have to further bail the ODA out, and pay to repair damage such as this with higher utility costs.

  17. Kevin Reader
    Boffin

    Photos found and it was a direct hit!

    These might have been linked before but I only just found them.

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/23919135@N00/

    They claim to show the interior of the tunnel and reveal an almost perfect score! I'm familiar with the scoring at olympic archery, the other sport where you launch a projectile and see where it hits - it looks like a 9 or even a 10 as its very near dead centre.

    Enjoy? I'll get my coat its the one with breathing apparatus and asbestos on it...

  18. Hardcastle
    Paris Hilton

    ...he shoots, he scores... Goooooooal

    Life has to be sucking royal for this sap, for all the things one can be remembered for, his legacy is going to be that he single-handedly knocked out communications in a major city... then again, it could be Divine Intervention that put the clamp on Big Brother's watchful snooper for a while. Hero or Zero, what say you? Like they say here in the States... "Call before you dig". So much for that being common knowledge...

    On the other hand... if he can bore a hole and hit the spot that dang good, he can probably pique the interest of Paris...

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