UPD Power Outage Hits BT Phone and Broadband Services in Eastbourne UK
Approximately 20,000 BT broadband and phone customers in the Eastbourne and neighbouring Brighton area (dial code 01323), including local schools and hospitals, have today suffered a serious loss of connectivity after a power outage struck the local Eastbourne telephone exchange this morning at around 9:39am.
At the time of writing the issue remains unresolved, while BT’s official service status page simply says: “We’re really sorry but we’ve got a problem at the moment in the East Dean Eastbourne area, which means that some of our customers will be having trouble getting online. We’re trying to fix the problem as quickly as we can.”
A quick check with several other UK ISPs, including Zen Internet, PlusNet and Eclipse Internet, appears to suggest that the problem has not spread or at least hasn’t had a noticeable impact beyond BT’s own customers.
UPDATE 10th May 2012
The problem was finally resolved at just after 8pm last night.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on Twitter, Google+, Facebook and Linkedin.
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Don’t the exchanges have backup supplies? Though perhaps, if the power went down at 09:39, the battery has run out.
According to BT Wholesale’s reporting, the outage is only affecting a handful of our customers. Not enough to warrant opening a service status thread. There is mention of it here mind you – http://usertools.plus.net/exchanges/mso.php?id=15372
Bob Pullen
Plusnet Digital Care
Thanks for the update from PlusNet Bob.
The batteries should hold until a power engineer starts the genny, sounds a bit more involved than a simple power cut…
The generator should auto start in the event of a failure to the main supply
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A3D6yEZlQw&feature=related
Nice video explaining the exchange power setup – maybe the failure caused some kit to blow?? This resolved yet?