Quickline UK ISP Boss Apologises for Major Broadband Outage

The Managing Director of fixed wireless broadband ISP Quickline (Bigblu Broadband), Steve Jagger, has publicly apologised to customers after their network was hit by a major outage that began yesterday morning and stemmed from the loss of multiple fibre optic connections.

The fibre fault itself appears to have occurred on one of Quickline’s key transit providers and initial attempts to locate the break were disrupted by the presence of “heavy vegetation in the area.” A team of engineers was eventually able to isolate the fault as being 32.55 kilometers from their Rotherham testing site, which appeared to reside near a railway.

On top of that the location was then identified as “being in a high crime area,” which meant that the optical fibre cable had been “foam sealed and lids glued, delaying access to fiber and equipment.” The last engineering update estimated that the problem would be resolved at about 9am this morning (roughly 24 hours after it began) but at the time of writing the issue still appears to be on-going.

As a result the MD of Quickline has done something that we rarely see in this industry (at least coming from senior management) and issued a public apology.

Steve Jagger said:

“Please accept my sincerest apologies for the extended outage affecting some of the Quickline area.

Although the resilience in place in most areas allowed the network to be rerouted, the loss of multiple fibres we had thought to be diverse, left us without both our primary and secondary circuits in some areas.

Designs are already underway to give carrier and physical diversity to all parts of the network where this has and could occur. These works will be completed within 90 days.

I note a number of comments regarding the loss of phones and other critical business services. Although we strive to maintain our uptime guarantee it cannot be 100% on any individual link, we therefore always recommend a standby connection. We will circulate details to customers of our highly cost effective managed failover services, including router upgrades and diverse path, to keep your business live should there be any issues in the future.

Thank you for your patience during this difficult time, and thank you to the team that reduced the impact to customers where possible. I will keep you updated on the upgrades as they happen.”

All ISPs suffer major outages and sadly some of these will occasionally last for longer than a few minutes or hours. But we have to credit Quickline for keeping their customers up-to-date on progress via social media and with being so open about it.

UPDATE 10:02am

Quickline report that their service should now be returning to normal.