91Èȱ¬

Russ, Manchester
Fortunately, it appears, I am one of the few whos business and home life wasn't effected by the tunnel fire, so I can't begin to imagine some of the frustrations some of you might have felt. I have however, received an apology from BT in the form of a letter through the post yesterday which I thought was excellent publicity for them. Obviously showing genuine concern for the disruption caused. As an IT manager, being on the end of a 'reactive' business, winning people over during times like these is an almost impossible task! I congratulate BT staff/engineers on their effective and quick remedy to the situation, and hope that they can learn constructively from the incident. As for all the whingers baying for BTs blood, be grateful it only took a week to resolve!

Haggis
No phones or internet at home or work = no ticket to Glastonbury this year. Gutted.

Jamie
What would you choose? Pay twice as much for your phone line, or let this happen again 10-20 yrs down the line somewhere else in the country cos bt can't arrord to re-wire the whole uk telephone network. y'all would choose to keep your money....! enough said i think! Good on ya to the bt engineers and the csa's. Keep up the good work. (great service to me and my business for 9yrs) p.s, i would advise you businesses to do what i did and set up "2" back up systems. i can keep in contact with my business from anywhere in the world using 2 mobiles and a couple of laptops..... £2,000.00 that is garenteed for about 20yrs. pretty damn good investment if you ask me!

Another BT bloke
Right guys, it's time for a little bit of reality. I'm a BT transmission maintainance engineer which means I work on the stuff that hangs on the ends of these fibre optics and know what's involved in repairing cables. Let me tell you, splicing a fibre is a difficult and fiddly enough job in a well lit server room, the conditions these guys must be working in it's like asking someone to perform brain surgery in the monkey enclosure at Marwell. So let's have less whinging about the delays, there's only so many engineers you can fit in a tunnel and I'm sure there's a non-stop stream doing just that. I wonder if other telcos have that many highly skilled engineers, equipment, and new cable available at the drop of a hat? Joining copper cables is no more glamourous, but a copper cable carrys 1 phone line, a fibre carrys thousands of lines, which are you gonna reconnect first? Second - fire extiguishers, precuations, etc. Yeah, OK, sure. So as well as owning enough underground network to go to the moon and back a few times, we're expected to install a remotely-monitored smoke detector every 100yds and an underground CO2 extinguisher network as well? Get real. Why doesn't the government install automatic CO2 extinguishers down every single road in the country, that would save LIVES not just data, and I'd wager there's probably less roads than there are miles of BT owned cable. Diverse routing - Did anyone notice that 999 services were largely unaffected and that *some* traffic HAD been diverted around the problem - there ARE backups in place but single residential lines do not take priority over 999 service or major telephone traffic services, sorry guys. As for your ADSL, well, no matter what some may think it's not essential to life, is it? Maybe you shouldn't have thrown away your 56k modem... Also, all the major "backbone" parts of the network ARE diversely routed, but how far do you expect this to go? Should we run an extra copper cable to your back door too, just in case the one to your front door gets dug up by your dog? Want to pay double the line rental? Thought not. BT has backups of most things, spare links, spare eqipment, we have fire, flood and gas detection, UPS and a backup generator which is remotely monitored and routine tested in EVERY EXCHANGE from a rural shed to the huge main centres like manchester. Care to guess how much that little lot costs? And people here are suggesting we should now extend these precautions to the millions of miles of cable under the UK? I would put money on BT knowing that fire was there within minutes or seconds of it breaking out, and the fire service were probably notified pretty damn soon after that. As was pointed out access wasn't exactly quick-n-easy and the damage was very confined all things considered. We are an emergency service and are bound by rules which mean we must have all this contingency in place, I don't know the rules but I'd like to see if other telcos would take a hit of this magnitude as well as BT has. Also, some emergency services do not have diverse backup because they simply cannot afford it, is this BT's fault? As it stands, the network is currently changing from PDH to SDH, from "dumb" point-to-point fibre links to remotely managed fibre rings that will mean, eventually, that even an incident as severe as this will not have anywhere near such an impact. BT are installing huge amounts of this kit, which represents a huge investment (why not ring Marconi and ask how much a *single* SDH add-drop mux costs) so to suggest that BT does not take this seriously is ill informed to say the least. However, there has evidently been a planning cock-up here, that has meant an awful lot of traffic routed through this single point, and I dare say a few people will get their arses kicked and I hope they do. Planning (or lack of) is one area I personally think is BT's downfall, mainl because it's only when things like this happen that anyone (or anyone who's listened to) notices a bad job. That said, if YOU had the job to route a cable in

Tim, Manchester
It's all well and good saying companies should have BCP's in place. We did and managed to route internet traffic through other means. However, what happened to BT's Business Continuity Plan?

Rob,Manchester
To staggered at Manchester, the level of your ignorance astounds me. Go to another company, and find one that gives a 100% availability guarantee. Or acept responsibility for not protecting yourself...

Neil, Macclesfield
To all the BT Engineers and Fire Fighters - well done and thank you for working so hard to restore this essential service. To those who are complaining and believe that the world is a perfect place where unforeseen incidents never happen - get real!

Paul, Manchester
Whats going on BT, 5 days on and still down. Still not phone or ADSL Connection. I can never get through and i am losing £250 a day. This is a JOKE!!! How can a multi million pound profit company not have any back or safety precautions to make sure that this never happened. Where is all my phone bill going - peoples pockets i think!!!

John Manchester City Centre
I work for an independant national Telecoms Service Provider based out of Manchester. We were more or less unaffected by this outage because we have our own fibre network in various places around the UK. This problem would not have been as serious if BT had routed Backbone trunk cables connecting the two major switching sites, Manchester Dial House and Rutherford House, via diverse paths in the first place and I believe they became complacent about the protection of these circuits because these cables ran in a secure underground tunnel complex built in 1954 to provide protection against a Nuclear attack! They could have run at half capacity AT LEAST if one of the backbone cables became severed. BT will most probably look into deploying redundant paths to these major Manchester switching sites now this has happened. Infact, I would not be surprised if BT revise the diversity of thier backbone network up and down the country in particularly, in metro areas at the least....

Andy, Manchester
As one of the BT engineers who has been repairing the damage to the fibre routes in the tunnel this week, I'd like to make a few comments. First, thanks to all those people who've offered messages of support to the engineers and fire crews working down there. Second, the conditions are dreadfull. It was never the best place to work, but now everything is covered in black dust and has that burnt smell about it. Third, We at BT are ALL doing are best to restore service as soon as possible. From us jointers working to repair the hundreds of fibre conduits in that tunnel, and some of the conduits have over a hundred fibres in each one. Each fibre is about the size of a human hair, and has to be spliced with an accuracy that you would not believe. Get it wrong, and it's useless. Also the exchange data builders who have re routed as much traffic around the damage as possible. Fourth, The comments about other telecoms operators using our fibres and routes are coorect. I can't think of a single operator that doesn't use BT to get there traffic around the country. However... On a personal note, I spend a lot of time repairing fibres that have been damaged by roadworks etc, and that doesn't cause much hassle as by the time we get to the site, the traffic has been re-routed, but I would like to know why so much traffic is running down one route with no back up. I know very little about why that is - I just splice fibres, but someone at BT does, and I think they should give our customers an answer, and do something to ensure that the chances of this happening are reduced. I'm back off down the tunnel again in 4 hours.

gmc, didsbury
to Staggered of Mcr: if your business critically depends on telecoms to that value, then (1) that is exactly why you should have a business continuity plan to manage the impacts of unforseen or 'unimaginable' events, and (2) your SLAs (and associated penalties for failure) with BT, and business insurance should cover all financial loss you suffer. If you don't have a suitable BCP and you don't have suitable SLAs for your business, then you haven't done all that is necessary on your part. Whether or not any supplier could/should prevent any catastrophic failure, it doesn't help those affected keep their businesses alive. BCPs, if analysed, implemented and reviewed regularly, will not prevent these incidents, but they should make it possible for businesses to continue trading, and recover much more quickly. Before companies look for compensation from BT, they should first look to their directors and managers to review the effectiveness (or even existence) of their business continuity plans. PS I am not absolving BT (or any supplier) of their burden to provide services, with suitable precautions.

Jon, Manchester
I thought everything went by statelite these days. Why are they sending things down tunnels?

David, Manchester
Why are people blaming BT for their OWN lack or redundancy? Yes, my full sympathy to those who haven't been paid, can't get cash, have medical needs, etc.. However, if you rely on your internet and voice connections, where are your backup plans? Didn't you check with your porviders? More fool you! Here we still have not BT provided lines working. However, our web site and email are still working, even though our site is hosted in Manchester. Our email works as our ISP has a fallback server elsewhere (MX records priorities anyone) and we have local backup copies of of site. Simple case or reloading these elsewhere and getting the records on the backup and geograpically remote DNS servers of our ISP updated. If you rely so much on these services and haven't got yourself prepared you are as much to blame for your situation as anyone else.

Ian, Oldham
Our land-line seems to be working ok now but the ADSL part of it is still down. This is probably because all major broadband internet traffic routes through central Manchester. Like alot of people nowadays, I manage alot of my finances and business communications using the internet and the chaos really is disrupting. Therefore, not only should businesses operating from call centres, etc be able to claim compensation from BT. 91Èȱ¬ users have just as much right as any other for compensation and I will seek out just that! How can a tunnel 30 meteres down have a fire that caused so much damage? I wouldn't be surprised if one of those overpaid BT engineers was having a fag break on that fateful day!

Andy
Has anyone actually thought about complaining to their ISP and Banks to find out if they had a back-up plan if the phone lines went down? This is the problem people seem to take BT for granted and when an incident of this magnitude occurs all people do is blame everything on BT! BT are like every other company, they provide a service to the best of their abilities, I other companies (i.e. ISP, Banks, etc) decide to rely soley on one company with full knowledge of the cabling capabilities that they have, and don't put in place their own contingency plans, that is their problem NOT BT's

P Smith in Chorlton
Can anyone help me..I am an NTL user and my phone lines are down..has anyone else experienced these problems.I would of thought this only affected BT users..the whole street is out too!

Chris, Newcastle
To all those spouting that contingencies should have been in place to prevent this happening in the first place, saying that routing should have been doubled etc - would you also expect there to be a seperate routing of your water, electricity and gas supplies? This is all very well but all risks are waited against cost and to think otherwise is ridiculous! The country simply cannot afford that level of contingency. The only cost-effective and logical contingency would be those already implemented - distribution of 6000 mobile phones to support the most needy in the community, provision of payphone trucks in areas most affected, implementation of an extremely efficient disaster management procedures, round the clock repair resource. There are literally hundreds of thousands of miles of routing in this country and it is ludicrous to suggest that protecting this system should be 100% reliable and predictable - no system affords that level of security - recent events are testimony to that. This whole affair does highlight the vulnerability of reliance on modern technology and those who have sited it should be the businesses who needed contingency plans in place are absolutely right. We should all be accountable for our own risk management - it is not up to the likes of BT to run that for you. What some may see as showing the inadequacies of BT for me show the true professionalism of the company - the swift recovery of service for thousands of customers and the dedication of the jointers in the tunnel are proof that few other companies could handle disaster management on this scale as effectively or efficiently. BT may not be the cheepest but they are the best!

Staggered, MCR
GMC! I'm amazed you think this is the companies responsibility. We went with BT because they sold to us a £2million spend by saying they had the most resiliant network and back up systems and we didnt need anyone else!!!!! Our tender will be up shortly and BT will not even be in the frame.

Robin, Hathersage
When people are saying its BT's fault I think they mean its BT's fault that they didnt allow for the possibility of a fire. No one is blaming them for the fire itself. The simple fact is that they should have realised that this could happen and have had a decent contingency. That's what has got people's backs up. So, all you BT staff blaming it on uncontrollable circumstances are just re-enforcing the point BT was not prepared for this. As the ex BT manager points out BT have to hold their hands up. They should also pay out compensation.

Daz M
I think it is great, I love it!

Paul Doleman, Manchester
Fascinating all the comments here. Let's just clarify what has happened: It's is not just a couple of "saddoes" loosing their phones for a day or two - most can live without that. It is: - 130,000 homes without phones for a week. - 1000s of business affected with untold damage to the local and national economy - emergency services affected with no comms to abulances (people could have died) - leased line and web services disrupted I don't blame BT for the fire or criticise their efforts to restore service. However, it is beggars belief that the owner and operator of the country's largest comms network has truly awful back-up and clearly does not understand or chooses not to operate adequate redundancy, resillience or re-direction methods in its network infrastructure. What message does that send to terrorists, put a big enough bomb in the right place and you'll not only terrorise and kill innocent members of the public, but you disrupt the comms and business of a major city for days if not weeks. I wonder how many other cities in the UK have similar weakpoints in their infrastrucuture.

Lisa CSA
To all the men and women dealing with this problem, be safe and keep up the good work all the best

Angry, Manchester
And anyway, unless you are directly affected by this problem you are not presenting your comments from an affected and informed point of view, lets just hope this happens to all the country, and see what peeps who are not affected have to say then. Just wait till your wages don't arrive in your nice cushy bank accounts, or you can't get money out the cash machine, lets see just how sad you think it is then!! And no I am not speaking from a personal point of view, I have been paid and I can access cash, I just work for a Company who hundreds of pees rely upon being able to pay their wages electronically!

gmc, didsbury
to all the business complaining about the impact of this, it is YOUR responsibility to have a business continuity plan in place, for when a critical supplier lets you down, or major incident happens. Modern life is too complex for anyone to guarantee everything all the time, and their is always random chance too. If you don't have contingency worked out in advance, you are negligent, regardless of whether BT (or any supplier) could have prevented this.

Angry, Manchester
Due to no telecommunications in my normal place of work, I today travelled to another office. We got precisely 2 hours of work done before the system went down there too! BT say this is a totally unrelated fault, well that's as maybe, but yet another wasted day time and travelling to yet another faulty failed BT connection. Yes I applaud the engineers, yes I'm grateful there was no loss of life, but someone at BT should swing for this, it's the management and planning that's at fault, I've wasted 3 days this week so far costing my Company time money and expenses, why should we foot the bill? Somebody must be responsible and if you pay for a service and that service isn't available then compensation should be paid! Would you pay for a service that isn't delivered? If you're not in the badly affected area as I am I'm sure you're sitting pretty, if however you were in my shoes I'm sure you'd feel differently. And yes I do have an internet connection at home to post this message as I am on NTL, BT ripped me off for years whilst they had the monopoly, the only reason the prices have come down is because they now have some serious competition!

Rob, Stalybridge
He-hey! Compensation? no, afraid not, people should be paying BT for freeing them from the slavery of the modern workplace for a couple of days. Jeez, chill out, sit back and laugh as the greedy leeches try to ruin another national institution!

Cheryl, Glossop
It is interesting to see most of the comments telling us to 'stop whining' etc have come from outside the affected area, and the support for BT from within. It hasnt just been our phone lines that went without warning, communication to ambulances had we needed one, access to cash machines, the ability to top up mobile phones (e-topup uses the phone lines), use debit cards, some mobile phone networks went down as well. At first glance it may seem that we lost the use of our phones for a while, but in reality it went a lot further than that

Chris, Manchester
Umm love the way people try to shift the blame to NTL or Telewest. What could be more Micky Mouse than setting fire to a tunnel. Hearing rumours from a contact at BT that it may have been a cigarette butt and not an electrical fault. Ive had an ntl telephone for years and its never once gone off!! Especially not as Micky Mouse as BT

nicolene, buxton
thankyou thankyou thankyou bt!!!! i now have accessed my cash(after a 3 hour cash machine crawl lol) and i have managed to topup everything(gas, phone ect) just incase the lines arnt quite stable yet. i am so glad and relived things are begining to get back to normal. thanks again nicolene

Zander, NTL
Everybody condemning BT’s apparent incompetence with their underground infrastructure, Now isn’t it luckily that BT installed fire breaks in these tunnels, Imagine what could have happened if the tunnels were open straight thru, a few days to repair could have been a few weeks. Good luck to BT with repairing the network that we all use. Also where is the help from all the other network providers, working together…helping each other out…. don’t think so. Respect to BT.

Chris
To Joe: Anchor was decommissioned and flooded years ago. Yes, blue asbestos is there. But what about fire supression systems? Maybe a maintence fauilure? Budget cuts? Whilst as far as i am aware,the Guardian exchange was semi decomissoned, I wonder whatwhould have happened to all the in place equipment, fire supression, airfiltration etc. As for teh cause we will have to await the verdict.

Jono-City Centre
I work for a national nursing network covering the whole of the uk. since the fire we are unable to offer full support to our clients and support staff, the land lines do not work and the mobile emergency service from our mobile phones is only 25% effective. Every one unstands the situation and we as office based staff are lucky as with the current we can enjoy it and have a drink or two. xx

John Manchester City Centre
This is indicitive of a general loosening of standards since the privitisations of publicly owned utilities. These cables will have only been laid within the last 10years. They will not have been done to the exacting standards, in terms of fire resistance and redundancy that the GPO would have been subject to. Standards have relaxed due to cost pressures. We can have a first class system but we all end up paying for it and it isn't going to happen where there is competition. Even if you did pay twice as much for your communications would you believe it would go on top-notch capital equipment?