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
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.