Glasgow to Lerwick network fault impacts Shetland villagers
Although initially ongoing problems and blame were blamed on customers’ routers or computers at the Shetland villages of Vidlin and Uyeasound, BT has now held its had up to the fact that business and home internet users experiencing difficulties with their broadband connection were due to a fault within the BT network. As a result residents were left without broadband for almost 30 hours on Wednesday and Thursday , reaching a maximum speed of 0.5Mbps (512Kbps) but unfortunately it took almost 24 hours for the service provider to admit it was a their problem their.
Similar network faults had affected the rural villages at least eight times in 2006 and 2007 but the fact that BT had invested £40,000 last year in an effort to fix the problems,made the service provider reluctant to believe it was responsible for the issue.
A BT statement however admitted “it was the usual suspect which caused the problem, that is a fault on the virtual path of the core network between Glasgow and Lerwick. Traffic then had to be switched over at the ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) node in Glasgow. Alarms did not go off, because the link only partly failed and continued to carry other broadband traffic."
"This is the first failure in around six months, but that is still once too often. Much work has been carried out on the core network to solve this recurring problem and it’s deeply frustrating both to us and yourselves that it has happened again.”
Speaking to the Shetland News, Helen Erwood, a pharmaceutical consultant who works from her home in Vidlin explained that the BT broadband problem was having serious implications on her job: “It is just pathetic when I have to explain to the European Regulatory Agency that I can’t submit vital documentation to Europe because BT has an issue with providing a proper broadband service. This latest outage has significantly disrupted our business,” said Dr Erwood said.
Source: http://www.shetland-news.co.uk/