Vodafone phone and mobe biz service goes titsup Vodafone's One Net service has gone down, leaving businesses with no working phones. The service, which merges landlines with mobiles so finger-on-the-pulse folk can pick up their calls anywhere no matter which number customers call in on, has been down for about an hour. A Reg reader told us that the outage had knackered …
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Please please please stop telling me what twitter thinks.
I get enough "I hate IT people, why has something gone wrong, you're useless, fix it now" bullshit at work.
Stuff breaks, get over it. My guess is a team somewhere just had lunch cancelled. Maybe you should look up the word redundancy or take meaning from "Al your eggs in one basket"
if it is critical to stay on the Wacky Wacky Webbiepoo, for instance, the savvvy operator will have multiple vendor redundancy. if it is life critical, say an airline's operations office, they really should have dual entrance points for those multiple vendors, with absolutely nothing in the network duplicated in the same CO, duct, or on the same side of the building. this can be engineered. it is costly as bringing the moon home to the kiddies. but this is considered full redundancy. smart companies have their crown jewel databases in multiple cities on live replication, so a tsunami or a bomb in one place simple means the inputs stop to the other databases until one of the redundants is made the working DB, and business carries on from another ops center. the business that has no internal backups is the business that needs one or two workers.
...more the fact that it was almost impossible to get any information about it. I was lucky(ish) and only spent 15 minutes on hold to Vodafone OneNet customer service, to be told that they had a problem and no idea when it would be fixed. I did suggest that in the 21st century putting something on their website might be the done thing, or otherwise contacting customers paying good money for a dead (premium) service to let them know it was belly up. But they're all the same these days - it's like when BT have a network outage their tech teams have to go through so many hoops to be allowed to actually put up a network outage notification on the service status page that by the time they get approval (if they ever do) the outage has probably been fixed already. Wouldn't it be nice if infrastructure service providers would actually communicate with their paying customers instead of looking for ways to spin it so they aren't liable for anything...?
Vodafone today exemplify the malaise in the British Telecommunications industry:
They laid off a significant proportion of their engineers then whinge when they can't restore broken services. It's unlikely to get fixed any time soon, and is going to cause major damage to their credibility in the business market.
A bigger problem is that there really isn't a viable alternative!
I believe there *are* alternative providers to Vodafone. In fact I'm certain of it.
If the market wasn't engaged in a deranged race to the bottom in terms of pricing, telcos might not feel the need to cut until they can see bone - the company that spends money on resilience and infrastructure is the company with higher prices that loses all its customers.
Have you tried the "alternatives"?
O2 - utterly clueless, vacant, only interested in sales, sales, sales.... Their "service" is a bad joke.
Everything Everywhere? Even worse than O2. "Nothing, Nowhere" would be a more appropriate name.
No - there isn't any alternative to Vodafone for serious business users (and their service isn't particularly great).
I can't see your "race to the bottom" when it comes to pricing either: Britain is the second most expensive place IN THE WORLD to make a phone call!
Why do companies in the communication business have such a hard time keeping people informed? Any new services they bring out are given massive press and announcments but when they have problems the quickest way (currently) to find out if it's just you seems to be to search Twitter for "<company name> down" and check how many are recent.
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