UK Broadband ISPs Should Stop Making Service Status Pages Useless
The ability of a broadband provider to offer an effective and informative ‘Service Status‘ page, which can be useful for keeping customers updated about developments during network outages, is a crucial but often overlooked feature of modern internet provision. Yet in recent years’ ISPs seem to have been making them less and less effective or removing them entirely.
In the past it was fairly normal for any ISP worth their salt to include a Service Status page, which would often be kept regularly updated with general network incidents, planned maintenance and major outages. Such pages help to keep consumers informed and, as a result, they can also reduce the pressure on support lines (phone), which are often at risk of becoming overloaded with demand during major outages.
Some broadband providers, such as Andrews & Arnold (example) and Zen Internet (examples here and here), still maintain fairly informative and dedicated service status pages. But others seem to have either got rid of them almost entirely (e.g. Plusnet), made them harder to find and access (e.g. sticking them behind an account login – makes life tedious if you don’t have those details on the device you’re using) or reduced the level of information they provide to the point of being almost insultingly vague. Some ISPs even require you to enter a landline number to access the details, which is hard luck if you’re on a data-only connection!
Advertisement
In place of those we have seen some providers putting more effort into communicating their outages via social media, which does have its merits (albeit more of a complement than a replacement). In addition, not everybody uses social media and the updates given via those usually only cover major outages. Suffice to say, there remains a strong argument for a centralised way of finding related information.
On top of this we have also seen the odd peculiarity, such as with the way that a tiny number of network operators (e.g. Virgin Media) often seem to tie their website too closely to their physical network (i.e. many of Virgin’s big outages have often taken their service status page offline too, which rather defeats their purpose). But the latter is mercifully quite a rare occurrence.
In an ideal world we’d like every ISP to maintaining a Service Status page, which would include a useful summary of current network outages (inc. a history log of recent ones), expected fix times and some limited details about the cause. Sadly, Ofcom’s rules do not specifically require ISPs to communicate details of the service outages / disruption events they suffer, which we think is one area that is ripe for the regulator to improve.
However, it’s important to remember that all complex broadband and mobile networks will inevitably suffer from faults, but the harm this causes is often magnified when providers fail to keep consumers updated in a timely fashion. The information vacuum this creates often gets filled by wild speculation and causes anxiety among those who don’t know whether the fault is within their home or the remote network.
Advertisement
The good news is that websites like Down Detector or the ‘Disconnections‘ section in Speedtest.net’s App are slowly becoming more useful as a way of figuring out what’s going on. But their usefulness only really extends to major outages, while smaller or more localised events often won’t register or are harder to spot. In addition, they don’t cover many smaller network providers.
Admittedly, the need for a decent Service Status page probably isn’t top of everybody’s criteria when choosing a new ISP, but we’d argue that it should be – it’s already one of our top considerations when looking to switch. In our view, any ISP that cannot communicate such events in a clear, accessible and timely fashion is failing its customers and does not deserve your money.
How would you rate the service status page provided by your ISP?
- Good (0%, 0 Votes)
- Average (0%, 0 Votes)
- Poor (0%, 0 Votes)
- My ISP doesn't have, or I couldn't find, such a page (0%, 0 Votes)
Total Voters: 0
Advertisement
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 X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
« Broadband Speed Lifts Table of Top 60 UK Cities for Remote Working
Advertisement
Leave a Reply
Privacy Notice: Please note that news comments are anonymous, which means that we do NOT require you to enter any real personal details to post a message. By clicking to submit a post you agree to storing your entries for comment content, display name, IP and email in our database, for as long as the post remains live.
Only the submitted name and comment will be displayed in public, while the rest will be kept private (we will never share this outside of ISPreview, regardless of whether the data is real or fake). This comment system uses submitted IP, email and website address data to spot abuse and spammers. All data is transferred via an encrypted (https secure) session.
Hear! Hear!
What’s the point of a status page if it doesn’t actually show any meaningful information?
If there isn’t a significant outage, most ISP status pages won’t show it. But call in and you’ll be told there’s an ongoing fault.
Why not have that information publicly available and easily accessible?
Kudos to the ISPs who do their best to keep their customers informed.
Hear but not here…
It a tick box, they have a status page.
Of course any competent regulator would have some standards, monitoring and enforcement… but we have ofcon ?
Zen’s status page is far from useful and most definitely should not be used as a good example. Twice over the years I’ve had a total outage that’s affected our entire village and not once did anything appear on there, even a week later with no service.
Also, it’s listed via exchange and area code. I don’t have a phone number anymore, so do I use the old area code? Zen themselves weren’t sure. Likewise the average joe doesn’t know what exchange they are on, nevermind when you throw headend exchanges in to the mix. Do I lookup my local exchange or my headend exchange? Listing by exchange is totally pointless.
Zzoomm has a status page, and it is not bad at all, but the link is at the bottom, so a lot of scrolling to get to it. I remember, in the days of Metronet, that they had the link in plain view. I realise that reliability is better these days, but it is still nice to be able to get the link without scrolling a few pages.
These days, if there is a problem, it is normally a wipe out, no broadband at all, but we do have smartphones now to be able to access the site, but then that makes scrolling down a load of pages worse.
Maybe I should stick a link on my phone, but to be honest, I have had no need to use the status page for months,
Zen customer here with a current outage since last night at 20:30. got an email from zen this morning to say its a known event with an estimated fix date of today at 23:00. there is nothing on their status page which mentions any issues in my area so i’ve asked them to provide a link but i’m not holding my breath.
Sticking a status page behind a login is a pet peeve of mine. It’s useless if you don’t have a password manager given that you should really have complex passwords for each site but mostly in that if say, a less savvy family member needs tech help on the phone because their internet went down and you’re with a different ISP, it’s essentially unobtainable information. I’m looking at you, Virgin media.
Brsk are pretty good with updating theirs, although it’s not very easy to find. Sometimes they even include pictures if it’s network damage. No method of subscribing though.
O2 allow you to watch a specific post code for mobile issues, and they’ll email and text you about ongoing issues or scheduled maintenance.
Absolutely agree! Any ISP worth their salt would be proud to have a meaningful Network Status page. The absence of such a page should be a warning to potential customers.
A good page would relieve the load on Customer Services at the time of an outage. It would, of course, be useful for customers who would otherwise get nothing from Customer Services due to overload. It would have a history of outage going back a few months and a description of the cause of any outage.
Come on ISPs – lets be honest and transparent for us, the customer.
Just joined Aquiss who have a WhatsApp channel they communicate outages on. Seems like a good way to do it. This is on top of an easily accessible status page on their website.
Three uk.
Since Tuesday morning we have had minimal signal 1 bar (25% of the usual 100%) and intermittent data on LTE, 5G doesn’t exist around here although Three says it does.
On site are engineers and a crane removing equipment because the tower block is to be demolished in May.
Looking at Three’s service status page I see it continues to pump out the usual lies saying everything is just fine with the network as it did on Wednesday.
I wish they would remove the service status page all together if they are not going to make a minimal effort to keep it current.
Is there an opportunity for an industry wide, single outage page – in a similar vein to powercut105 that all providers have to feed into? Type in your postcode and any outages by ISP are listed.
So many services (including ISPs) use a “manually update if there is an issue” service status page: what I would *really* like is a “red/amber/green” style display: “Red: Fault acknowledged” and Amber/Green based on the percentage of lines in that area actively “working” compared to historical data (i.e. if 95% of lines are being used and yesterday’s figure for the same time period was 93-96% then green: if yesterday’s was 98-99% then Amber “possibly fault”).
Oh, that would be proactive and might make it look like they have a lot of faults instead of being open and honest…
TalkTalk business status page isn’t bad, Nasstar tend to update theirs when there are major issues and KCom have got better. Having still got an account with PlusNet I thought their service page was long gone, always used to be ok.
My biggest gripe is the BT one
You need a telephone number to see anything…..
Try banks too…..Barclays chat was ‘down for maintenance’…..status page had a big green tick!
Here’s the catch 22 not mentioned. If your broadband goes down you have to have an alternative means to check any online status page (assuming it was remotely useful eg confirmed a problem in your area).
Ok most of us have smart phones (but not everyone) and who can remember the relevant url in times of need? Or any status page is not geographically specific enough anyway.
PlusNet do have a useful basic text based fault reporting system which gives you updates and that has been helpful a couple of times when my BB has gone down or kept dropping badly.
The problem with down detector, is that it doesn’t distinguish between actual ISP network issues, and issues specific to one end user. It can lead to a feedback loop where a few people with say line faults convince themselves it’s an area wide issue
Someone’s peeved at hyperoptic…fair point too
“Sadly, Ofcom’s rules do not specifically require ISPs to communicate details of the service outages / disruption events they suffer, which we think is one area that is ripe for the regulator to improve.”
Definitely a good shout here.
Useless status pages are such a frustration since it saves a lot of time if I can just have a look at a status page and know there’s no reason to call a ticket in because it’s a widespread outage. The dishonesty irritates me as well with a recent provider that was down for a couple of days showed no problems on their status page and boasting about how good their service is with no major incidents in 90 days which was a flat out lie.
I remember the days when Plusnet had not only a service status page but its page also included a web cam showing the support department along with information such as call waiting times and number of people waiting in the call queue. Such a shame it’s now much less informative and harder to access.