UPDATE2 Sky Broadband Customers Hit by Outage in Central England
A large number of Sky Broadband’s Internet and phone customers in the “South Midlands” area of England currently appear to be suffering from a significant service outage, which is affecting quite a wide area.
At this stage very little is known about the incident, although it did appear to start at around 3pm and seems to be affected a number of telephone exchanges around areas like BIGGLESWADE, GREAT BARFORD, LOWER SHELTON, OLNEY, STOKE GOLDINGTO, AMPTHILL, CARDINGTON, HARROLD, NORTH CRAWLEY, RAVENSDEN, SILSOE, BEDFORD, COLMWORTH, HAYNES, NEWPORT PAGNELL, SANDY, TURVEY, BLUNHAM, CRANFIELD, KEMPSTON, OAKLEY, SHEFFORD, FLITWICK, HEXTON, SHILLINGTON, TODDINGTON, CRANFIELD and WILSTEAD.
New. South Midlands. Customers may be unable to go online or make landline calls. Updates to follow.
— Sky Help Team (@SkyHelpTeam) August 16, 2016
UPDATE 6:50pm
As is not uncommon in this industry, the problem appears to have been caused by the break of a core fibre optic cable (this is normally due to accidents by third-party contractors).
Sky Status Update
We understand from our on site engineers that the problem has been caused by a fibre-cable break. Specialist engineers have been requested.We’ll provide an update on progress this evening.
We’re sorry for the continued inconvenience.
UPDATE 17th Aug 2016
The problem was finally resolved early this morning and here’s a picture of what happened. Ouch!
Update, Bedfordshire – Engineers are still currently working on this, once again sorry for the inconvenience. pic.twitter.com/PRZhBW8N11
— Sky Help Team (@SkyHelpTeam) August 16, 2016
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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We understand from our on site engineers that the problem has been caused by a fibre-cable break. Specialist engineers have been requested.We’ll provide an update on progress this evening.
We’re sorry for the continued inconvenience.
Update: 16th August, 18:37
Great to see LLU operators continuing to put big groups of exchanges onto daisy chains with loads of single points of failure.
What a mess our market is when a single fibre break can have such impact.
Yes very poor, can you imagine what a sky fttp rollout would look like ? 🙂
Need to stop buying up sports rights, and invest in a proper network.
Or give up on trying to do comms, and go back to TV instead.
To be fair they have less “newsworthy” outages than BT.
Then again, not many who create or read the news understand the concepts behind high availability.
Remember this outage was both the “best efforts” broadband as well as the voice network. Some of that deserves better robustness. Well, all of it deserves better, but for some of it, it is mandated.
Outages on BT depend what you’re referring to. The phone service on Sky uses the same fibre network as the broadband, so if you’re in the wrong place a break on any one of a number of fibre links will see your broadband and phone disappear.
The recent newsworthy outages were on the BT Retail ISP. The underlying networks seemed to be fine. BT Wholesale’s network is way more resilient than at least most LLU operators. LLU operators make extensive use of daisy chains for cost purposes, Wholesale are transport resilient pretty much everywhere.
Some of the Twitter responses to Sky are quite special. People complaining about paying ridiculous amounts for their WiFi. From Sky. Extortionate. People demanding compensation and furious as their broadband had been down for a whole 6 hours.
This is the market Ofcom created. Well played to them. People expect the moon on a stick and want to pay a price that wouldn’t buy a lolly on a stick.
Drama queens. Not an Ofcom creation, though, responsible as they are for a lot else of nonsense besides.
EEk what carnage dred to think how long it would take BT to fix that.
Maybe they use the same contractors…
Trolling karl please see the site rules
Why would Openreach need contractors for that job?
They don’t dig up pavements and roads themselves, they have civil engineering contractors to do it, same as everyone else.
Openreach would blow and splice the fibre either side of the break, the contractor would handle the dig to reach and repair the ducting, then the reinstatement.
Just FYI, Karl, it may well have been Openreach fibre that was cut. Unlikely to have been Sky’s own, would’ve belonged to Openreach, Virgin Media, Vodafone or AN Other. Sky own their core network and it’s resilient, they rent the backhauls and most of those aren’t for cost reasons.
Ah that makes sense why the repair was a bit slow.
When you bury infrastructure in the dirt this is inevitable.
The guy who was digging the hole however probably wished he stayed at home as he no doubt never heard the end of it.
However, 6hrs to fix is not to bad.
It wasn’t fixed in 6 hours.
At the end of the day the subscriber either expects an outage of 6 – 12 hrs every 10 years or so from local fiber cuts or pays significantly more every month of those 10 years for a more resilient broadband network (and its only a case of being ‘more resilient’, in all ‘consumer networks’ some parts are protected and there will be other single points of failure ).
The catch is that it is not an individual decision, every subscriber on that network has to be willing to pay extra.