Customers of internet providers Be Broadband and O2 UK appear to have been hit by a serious peering problem that causes intermittent difficulty with gaining access to websites. The issue results in some pages being either incredibly slow or completely failing to come up on the first load (subsequent refresh attempts will often bring the site up).

Unfortunately the difficulties, which appear to have been growing over the past couple of weeks, are nothing new to some of BE and O2's customers. Most recently it seems to have gotten much worse and is now causing quite a bit of frustration among those affected.


BE's official service status page was updated yesterday afternoon to say: "The issue is caused by [a] piece of equipment which will be replaced as soon as possible". In the meantime BE's unbundled ( LLU ) broadband network, which is also used by O2 UK, will continue to suffer from "latency, slow browsing and packet loss". No firm ETA for a fix has been set.

Last week BE confirmed that it would begin migrating customers over to its new core network by the end of February 2012 (here). The major upgrade, which will not complete until early 2013, is designed to improve the ISPs capacity, resiliency and support new features. Hopefully it won't suffer from the same peering problems as their current platform.

UPDATE 15th Feb 2012

This morning's latest status update from BE suggests that the problem has been identified and should now be fixed.


At the time of writing, about 6am, no change to the status has been made (i.e. no word on if this fixed it).

UPDATE 15th Feb 2012 @ 1:40pm

The game of musical chairs that is BE's Service Status page, which frequently switches the problem from being marked as "resolved" to "not resolved" and back again, appears to be continuing. Despite BE's efforts their customers are continuing to report problems and the situation remains on-going.

We've noted that BT's overall satisfaction rating, such as in the recent survey by Which? magazine, has seen some worrying declines of late. Problems that continue on for days, weeks or even months probably aren't going to help reduce O2 and BE's overall level of customer churn.

UPDATE 16th Feb 2012

BE now claims that, as some customers were suggesting awhile ago, the, "issue has been traced to the network of one of our peering providers. A case with them has been raised." Still no solution. Meanwhile, over on the BE Usergroup, some customers have found that the problem can be fixed by swapping between static and dynamic IP addresses.

UPDATE 17th Feb 2012

Customers appear to be reporting that the "the situation with the packet loss is a lot better" (BE's Status Quote), which follows the ISPs attempts yesterday to chase the problem with a peering provider. However the difficulty has still not been completely resolved and remains an open issue.

UPDATE 18th Feb 2012

BE claims to have finally resolved the problem and has even issued a wider public statement to explain a bit more about what has been happening.


Some reports indicate that a few customers might still be suffering from problems, such as when attempting to access the BBC's website. Needless to say that we'll be keeping an eye on this.

UPDATE 1st March 2012

BE has finally admitted what most people already knew, that the BBC problems are related to a lack of capacity and heavy load from customers using iPlayer video streaming.