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BTOR - Swadlincote ATE fire

Matt_2k34

ULTIMATE Member
Hey

So our telephone exchange seemingly had a fire last night. Connectivity died at 6.50, my dad's Fttp the other side of town was back up at 1.30, mines still down, tho not home to go for a wander and see the state.

Wondered if anyone had seen our heard anything/the damage/inside knowledge of what's been going on? 😊

Pouring one out to the poor engineers on call.
 
Only news I've seen about it is here https://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/local-news/fire-bt-exchange-cuts-7000-9033127#comments-wrapper

Burton Mail usually covers Swad, but there hasnt been any news in Burton since the 20th of December

The Advice was to use mobile phones if needed, which is great but the outage also covered other areas as well, suchas Repton, Ashby, Measham, Baton under needwood and so on , and some of the settlements inbetween some of those places there is little to no mobile phone signal - i know in Nearby Calke there are signs warning about no/poor phone signal in the limekilns area and to be aware of steep edges, falls etc.
The phone signal isnt that great around bretby/hartshorne either in the dips and wooded areas
 
Yeah it's all been pretty quiet considering :) (there was some stuff on FB but I try and avoid best as possible)


Was the best I've seen, but again not much detail.

I got home early hours of this morning and OpnSense had locked up, reboot and all came back perfectly so likely my connection restored within the same window.

Impressively quick turnaround (>5hr), so assuming very little damage to the building and equipment.

The phone signal isnt that great around bretby/hartshorne either in the dips and wooded areas
Downside to an area that's naturally quite valley-heavy, on-top of lots of clay and coal mining I guess :)
 
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Really surprised that this appeared to also take out mobile data on i believe all of the networks in the local area. I thought that they had some even minimal level of redundancy which didnt appear in this case. Does anyone know why that was?
 
Really surprised that this appeared to also take out mobile data on i believe all of the networks in the local area. I thought that they had some even minimal level of redundancy which didnt appear in this case. Does anyone know why that was?

At a guess all the local cell sites on OR circuits routed through the impacted exchange with no resilience from other diverse circuits or microwave.
 
If mobile masts have point to point backup, they tend to have 60ghz or 5ghz discs on them.
I'm not sure if the area is suitable for this type of deployment.
 
At a guess all the local cell sites on OR circuits routed through the impacted exchange with no resilience from other diverse circuits or microwave.
That seems like a staggering limitation if true. Is there a way to tell or is that only known by the mobile providers? It just doesn’t seem sensible in what are clearly urban areas where it should be easily possible - not least as a number of bigger exchange like burton on Trent are close by
 
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The mobile networks are obviously in competition with each other so sharing data about their backhaul arrangements for towers and resiliency is not necessarily something that is compatible commercially or under competition law. Seems like it would be something that the regulator would need to mandate, but I am not sure of they do.

Couple that with telcos who could provide the backhaul being awkward to disclose the exact path of circuits and then maintain that disclosure over the operational time of circuits can be a real challenge. Especially with the level and quality of documentation that telcos have of their infrastructure.

Obviously there are products where a specific backhaul provider sells two circuits where they guarantee diversity of path and switching/routing and they are supposed to maintain through the lifetime of the service, but where the end customer does this themselves using backhaul from different providers or microwave to their towers where they think the backhaul is diverse to the other becomes incredibly difficult.
 
It makes you wonder just how resiliant "new" communications realy are, Met office weather warnings often state that "there is a good chance that powercuts may occur,with the potential to affect other services such as mobile phone coverage"

And yet during a powercut the advice from the fixed line phone/internet companies is to use a mobile phone during a power cut, the very same thing that the weather warning says we could be unable to use.
 
The mobile networks are obviously in competition with each other so sharing data about their backhaul arrangements for towers and resiliency is not necessarily something that is compatible commercially or under competition law. Seems like it would be something that the regulator would need to mandate, but I am not sure of they do.

Couple that with telcos who could provide the backhaul being awkward to disclose the exact path of circuits and then maintain that disclosure over the operational time of circuits can be a real challenge. Especially with the level and quality of documentation that telcos have of their infrastructure.

Obviously there are products where a specific backhaul provider sells two circuits where they guarantee diversity of path and switching/routing and they are supposed to maintain through the lifetime of the service, but where the end customer does this themselves using backhaul from different providers or microwave to their towers where they think the backhaul is diverse to the other becomes incredibly difficult.
Yeah sure but all of the news and Facebook etc suggested that ALL mobile networks also stopped working - now some of that might have been volume of data but it looked more like it was a full data outage because of the exchange being down
 
It makes you wonder just how resiliant "new" communications realy are, Met office weather warnings often state that "there is a good chance that powercuts may occur,with the potential to affect other services such as mobile phone coverage"

And yet during a powercut the advice from the fixed line phone/internet companies is to use a mobile phone during a power cut, the very same thing that the weather warning says we could be unable to use.
Yeah sure but all of the news and Facebook etc suggested that ALL mobile networks also stopped working - now some of that might have been volume of data but it looked more like it was a full data outage because of the exchange being down
@Mark.J - it would be good to ask the mobile providers about this ?
 
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The issue of backup and resilience is one that will already be a hot topic in 2024.



The biggest issues around all of this relate to cost and space / access to install new kit. Cost increases will ultimately be footed by the consumer, one way or another.
 
For me though this falls into the just saving money bracket - some level of internet link that doesn’t all go through the same exchange for a HUGE area suggests either no planning or not wanting to pay. Battery backup I agree is likely to be massively different need lots more space etc but using another internet link either microwave (site in brizlincote valley has line of site for miles around for example) so would be posssible for any operators there…)

The issue of backup and resilience is one that will already be a hot topic in 2024.


The biggest issues around all of this relate to cost and space / access to install new kit. Cost increases will ultimately be footed by the consumer, one way or another.
 
For me though this falls into the just saving money bracket - some level of internet link that doesn’t all go through the same exchange for a HUGE area suggests either no planning or not wanting to pay. Battery backup I agree is likely to be massively different need lots more space etc but using another internet link either microwave (site in brizlincote valley has line of site for miles around for example) so would be posssible for any operators there…)

The issue of backup and resilience is one that will already be a hot topic in 2024.
You kind of can't just handover all of the premises to Burton, or other exchanges - If the handover point is Swad the diverse links come from there, e.g. for broadband customers - Burton's impact should be minimal (except a chunk of "Burton" addresses are actually served from Swadlincote - Stanton for example has addresses of "Burton" but with a Derbyshire postcode...). At the end of the day - your connection has to terminate *somewhere* - all you'd do is move the choke point further out (but you'd then also need powered kit at those locations too, amongst other limitations). There's a point where it's not really economically feasible to keep adding redundancy.

The problem with the microwave backup - is it's not as good as local connectivity, EE already do mast-to-mast via microwave in some places and its ... meh. I get *some* connectivity is better than none - also you then have the additional overhead of managing line of sight, and all the wonderful issues that come with having those links, vs something that 'just works' (e.g. doesn't need directionality adjustments after strong wind, site surveys to ensure trees for example aren't encroaching, etc. etc.)

My former employer tried to get Bass to put a repeater on top of the Bass Tower in Burton to give us line-of-site between our sites - they declined but it was the only way we'd be able to stop trees / building being built / construction equipment etc. getting in the way. We had microwave between two sites in Centrum100 and it was a bit of a joke tbh. Lots of moving lorries because of the (Scania?) unit behind us and trees made it pretty useless and we ended up paying virgin to use some dark fiber they owned through centrum.

Really surprised that this appeared to also take out mobile data on i believe all of the networks in the local area. I thought that they had some even minimal level of redundancy which didnt appear in this case. Does anyone know why that was?
When Virgin had outages during lockdown - it's also knock out EE because everyone would jump on their mobile to tether. We're not really covered by enough sites (thanks people who block the planning permission ^^) and the terrain makes it pretty difficult anyway.

AFAIK most sites have no real backup power, its why you see "mast on a truck/trailer" type setups where they can just go deploy a truck and it'll take over until the site is back up.

Only thing I can see them doing is getting providers to have multiple links at sites (e.g. BT + CityFibre, or VM + <altnet>) - but as alluded to above - something you might think is diverse isn't. Look at Telehouse London Outages - they take out most of our ISPs capacity :P

but where the end customer does this themselves using backhaul from different providers or microwave to their towers where they think the backhaul is diverse to the other becomes incredibly difficult.
Yep :) especially if they both terminate in the same location - diversity only goes so far, one of my work locations has diverse links - but they both go through the same duct for the last 30m or so to the building - as there's no other route in and no permission to do anything else.
 
It makes you wonder just how resiliant "new" communications realy are, Met office weather warnings often state that "there is a good chance that powercuts may occur,with the potential to affect other services such as mobile phone coverage"

And yet during a powercut the advice from the fixed line phone/internet companies is to use a mobile phone during a power cut, the very same thing that the weather warning says we could be unable to use.

How many people had resiliency with the "old" system though. All well and good having a landline that theoretically could work in an emergency, but in practice it dies when the mains powered cordless phone base station does.

In a mass emergency the landline networks might have become congested in short order anyway - that's why features were built in to give specific users (eg key politicians, emergency services) priority access.
 
something you might think is diverse isn't. Look at Telehouse London Outages - they take out most of our ISPs capacity :p
A good example of this is what happened to the BBC in about 2007. They paid for a geographically diverse network, and it normally was, but one set of failures led to the loss of diversity (both legs then passed through the same building) and a loss of air con in the building then caused issues on both. A third, unrelated failure then took out the BBC's own in house rebroadcast system that should have taken over in this circumstance.
 
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A good example of this is what happened to the BBC in about 2007. They paid for a geographically diverse network, and it normally was, but one set of failures led to the loss of diversity (both legs then passed through the same building) and a loss of air con in the building then caused issues on both. A third, unrelated failure then took out the BBC's own in house rebroadcast system that should have taken over in this circumstance.
It's interesting reading, that report. I seem to remember it was mono rebroadcast radio for the northern half of the country for a few hours.
 
The other thing we're assuming is that diverse fibre to cell towers is easy. In some places it will be easy, but in many (way more than half) it's difficult and expensive. With OFCOM asking relevant questions about resilience now, the networks will be assessing what's possible. It's all possible for a price, but is the price worth the risk?
 
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