Businesses suffer internet loss during the day

Posted by Karen on Oct 4, 2011 12:00:00 AM

According to reports yesterday over 5% (275,000) BT customers lost connectivity due to a power failure at a major BT exchange in the Birmingham area. Connections started to drop 13:00 and most residential customers began to see their services logging back on 15:00 onwards. However surprisingly it was business connections with higher SLAs and uptime assurances that had to wait even longer for services to return to normal. Reports from the BBC indicate that they did not see their connectivity restore for a “slightly longer period”. Whilst we do not know what constitutes as ‘slightly longer’ we do know that even two hours in the business world is two hours too long with no internet service. The fact that it happened as well during the day when most businesses would notice and less consumers would probably didn't help matters. While an SLA is a demonstration of an ISPs confidence in their network it will mean little, as some BT customers found out, in times of outages where it takes time to restore services. The problem is any compensation is going to be insignificant to the frustration and potential lost business. Much better to actually invest in a technology that is delivered over two networks so you aren’t just relying on one, such as our PureFluid or ADVANCE products which always use multiple carriers to ensure maximum uptime.

Topics: News