National Broadband Outage

[brundles]

Originally Posted by stairpotato

Imagine the uproar if an entire mobile phone network went down for 8 hours? Mobile phone networks are built with resiliency, and upgrades are well tested before they happen. One stupid mistake by an engineer couldn't cripple the entire network.

As someone who works supporting mobile networks I can assure you that they're not as robust as you might think. They're designed to be robust (telecoms grade is defined as 99.999% uptime - we're allowed about 5 minutes of unplanned outage per node over a whole year) but there is just no accounting for dodgy network components and stupid errors no matter how much testing you do.

That said, I don't think I've ever seen an entire network the size of Virgin Medias collapse in one go.

[saabmania2]

Originally Posted by therock247uk

/me is wondering if virgin can give me some credit back im not paying £18 this mouth for what they did last nite. heh

Some people!! i don't know even if your electric goes off they have upto 12 hours to fix it before you can file for compensation and your just worried about your broadband (overnite) and only for a few hours and you want a credit Hmmmm Some people!! p.s i wouldn't want to pay £18 for your mouth either.

[deed02392]

Originally Posted by saabmania2

Some people!! i don't know even if your electric goes off they have upto 12 hours to fix it before you can file for compensation and your just worried about your broadband (overnite) and only for a few hours and you want a credit Hmmmm Some people!! p.s i wouldn't want to pay £18 for your mouth either.

Well that is a bad analogy, as in my opinion, it is not acceptable that the electricity company should have a 12 hour grace period and equally it is not acceptable to have an entire night's loss of service on anything you pay for monthly, and 2. Anyone has every right to credit if it's enscribed in the terms of service. I'm not saying that it is in Virgin Media's case, but unless he has not read otherwise, forgive him for his mistake.

[scurlaruntings]

Originally Posted by BBKing

Haha. You funny guy, I kill you last.

Perl, almost entirely. Lot of Perl and PHP guys around the place, networks tends to run on Solaris (TV runs on Windows usually, which is a common source of interface friction). I do a lot of SOAP, XML and XSL stuff in there though, it's a lot more than just a script hacked together.

scurlaruntings, you're blocking PMs, if you want an MSN.

1 sec il amend my CP.Just checked PM`s are enabled on my profile.

[saabmania2]

Originally Posted by deed02392

Well that is a bad analogy, as in my opinion, it is not acceptable that the electricity company should have a 12 hour grace period and equally it is not acceptable to have an entire night's loss of service on anything you pay for monthly, and 2. Anyone has every right to credit if it's enscribed in the terms of service. I'm not saying that it is in Virgin Media's case, but unless he has not read otherwise, forgive him for his mistake.

why do you think i had the roll eye's i was having a laugh. but 12 hours is what the regulator stipulates is the min not the electric company's
some people i don't know!!!!

[SOSAGES]

it is the nature of the internet to break once in a while.
u just need to wait for someone to plug the cable back in.
i have never used an isp that didnt have people going offline

[deed02392]

Originally Posted by saabmania2

why do you think i had the roll eye's i was having a laugh. but 12 hours is what the regulator stipulates is the min not the electric company's
some people i don't know!!!!

It was your source for example, not mine.

[Gary L]

I heard that it was done on purpose. the money raised from people calling the support number through the whole night of downtime was to fund the Xmas party this year. only problem is they did too good a job and broke the ability for anyone to call the support number anyway

Think of all that money they lost out on in support calls!

[deed02392]

I can see that happening! :P

I've told my friend that it was a conspiracy that a country was testing a massive scale DoS attack on us. He believes me.

[rajravat]

i guess i was lucky, my connection was only out for about 10mins... from leicester

[stairpotato]

Originally Posted by foreverwar

You mean like this? (AT&T)

or perhaps Skype?

Or Orange?

Or Cingular?

Or Telcel?

Forgive me - but - one's not a mobile network, three aren't UK networks so the comparison is hardly valid - and the orange example mentions an 'unspecified number of customers' and certainly doesn't talk about a nationwide outage.

[brundles]

Originally Posted by stairpotato

Forgive me - but - one's not a mobile network, three aren't UK networks so the comparison is hardly valid - and the orange example mentions an 'unspecified number of customers' and certainly doesn't talk about a nationwide outage. In fact if anything it sounds like an HLR outage - which whilst a major outage is uncommon and would affect a relatively small number percentage of the customer base, and can be explained by a hardware failiure in a similar way to a UBR going down.

In my book, if you're gonna try to be clever at someone elses expense, it's always a smart move to actually be clever matey .

Those articles actually say they're HLR outages. For the record, a failed HLR will only affect a small percentage of subs on a big network and you're still talking in the millions for affected customers. If you pick a smaller network (and by small I mean something up to just under the size of the VM subscriber base) an HLR outage would knock out the whole network.

Not forgetting that an HLR outage won't be localised but would actually affect all subs homed on that HLR globally, nevermind nationwide, It may not affect all subs in the network but it will be global.

[stairpotato]

Originally Posted by brundles

As someone who works supporting mobile networks I can assure you that they're not as robust as you might think. They're designed to be robust (telecoms grade is defined as 99.999% uptime - we're allowed about 5 minutes of unplanned outage per node over a whole year) but there is just no accounting for dodgy network components and stupid errors no matter how much testing you do.

That said, I don't think I've ever seen an entire network the size of Virgin Medias collapse in one go.

Erm - that was actually my point....

[brundles]

Originally Posted by stairpotato

Erm - that was actually my point....

Weren't you saying that one stupid mistake couldn't knock out such a big chunk as VM did? Having been on the receiving end of callouts to fix said stupid mistakes I can assure you they can.

Whether we start talking %'s (VM's % in this case is very bad I'll admit) or subscriber numbers (in which case I've seen worse) is another matter. Using %'s isn't really honest as you can still lose service to millions of customers and just hide it in the rest of the subscriber base.

Edit: Just remembered - I have actually seen an entire mobile network collapse for many hours as a result of bad engineering and operator error. The original cause was actually nothing more sinister than a severe storm on the island the network is based on. Unfortunately things got worse because of the way GSM networks try and recover themselves.

[Toto]

Originally Posted by stairpotato

Forgive me - but - one's not a mobile network, three aren't UK networks so the comparison is hardly valid - and the orange example mentions an 'unspecified number of customers' and certainly doesn't talk about a nationwide outage.

The point is, these things happen - fact.

For some it resulted in an outage of no more than about 10 minutes, according to posters here.

For others it was more serious, but it didn't appear to affect every customer, as stated by Virgin Media's technical post on the subject.

At 9.20pm last night, customers in a number of regions temporarily lost
connectivity to their broadband and Video on Demand services. This occurred
as a result of an error during a routine maintenance process which affected
some customers' modems and set top boxes. Broadcast television and telephone
services were unaffected. Most of the problems occurred in the North West,
Yorkshire and the Midlands and the majority of affected customers regained
their service shortly after midnight. This morning our engineers have been
restoring the few remaining connections. We apologise for any inconvenience
this may have caused.

There is an FAQ part to that post also.

Hope that helps.