Re: BT Business Broadband - planned maintenance on a business broadband line during normal working hours

In uk.telecom.broadband, on Wed, 3 Mar 2010 16:18:21, alan wrote:

>BT Business Broadband account, suddenly no connection this afternoon
>did all the usual checks including rebooting the router.
>
>Phoned BT Business Broadband Support, did all the usual checks with
>them including checking the username and password on the router. No
>joy. Tried to connect to the BT Test Page. No joy. Eventually he says
>he will do some line tests. A couple of minutes later he comes back and
>says that there was planned maintenance on the line and it was hoped it
>would be finished by 5.30pm today.
>
>How likely does that sound? Would BT to planned maintenance on a
>business broadband line during normal working hours. Surely they would
>do any planned maintenance during the night when it is less likely to
>be used? No warning was received and I'm feeling a bit dubious about
>the situation.

BT planned maintenance can be seen at:
http://clueless.aaisp.net.uk/pew.cgi

--
Jim Crowther

In article <(E-Mail Removed) id>,
Don'(E-Mail Removed) says...
>
<SNIP>
> >How likely does that sound? Would BT to planned maintenance on a
> >business broadband line during normal working hours. Surely they would
> >do any planned maintenance during the night when it is less likely to
> >be used? No warning was received and I'm feeling a bit dubious about
> >the situation.
>
> BT planned maintenance can be seen at:
> http://clueless.aaisp.net.uk/pew.cgi

Just a shame that BT Retail doesn't care enough to make this information
available to their OWN customers. You pays your money and you makes your
choice.

"alan" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed) o.uk...
>
>>
>> My understanding is that there is no service level agreement
>> at all for any broadband or for that matter for normal
>> phone lines. (ISDN PRI is likely a different kettle of fish).
>>
>> They have no obligation of any kind to provide any service. Your
>> only remedy is not to pay and to go elsewhere.
>>
>> If you get a leased line then you do get a service level
>> agreement. I seem to recall 4 hours time to repair
>> on Gigabit Ethernet Fiber in Central London. My experience
>> was that it was occasionally not fixed in this time frame
>> but we always had a second line and so it was not worth
>> our while to make a huge fuss about it. I think that the remedy
>> was a small rebate on the amount paid but I could well be wrong.
>>
>> The failures that took a while to fix were the result of
>> wayward JCBs.
>>
>>
>
> The line failed at about 2:30pm and by the time I did all the checks and
> talked to BT it was about 4:00pm. At this point with with no chance of
> internet connection all the staff decided to go home. I went back to the
> office at 7:00pm and the broadband was working again and it is working
> fine today. However it is really annoying that they plan work that
> disconnects a business during the working day and there is no warning.
> Accidents happen and plant gets damaged but planned work should be done
> outwith business hours.

The general difficulty is that broadband over ADSL was never designed as a
reliable service for businesses. It was a "best effort" exploitation of the
idiosyncracies of the "last mile" telephone pair to get something that would
work without needing a baseband modem. By contrast ISDN uses something of
the same capabilities of the telephone pair but was conceived at the outset
as a business grade service.

So what is available is a "domestic" product which is priced accordingly.
It is true that some ISPs will offer Service Level Agreements but these are
hamstrung by the need to rely on the BT infrastructure and service
personnel.

Businesses have come to realise that a broadband connection is essential.
So you pay about £25 per month for a service which when it fails causes you
to send your staff home early. This is clearly stupid. How may staff?
What was the cost to your business? And how would that cost have compared
with paying for a business-grade broadband connection with a sensible SLA?
Or even the cost of an insurance policy which would have covered the cost of
sending the staff home early?

Having said that, I know of an instance where an electricity supply failed
(local substation fault) which caused a mail-order business to send all its
staff home for most of two working days.

Where a contnuous electricity supply is essential the usual arrangement is
to generate the electricity on-site, and fall back to the grid if the
on-site facility fails. The waste heat from the the generation process is
usually absorbed by heating offices and the like. A comparable service for
an internet connection might involve a point-to-point wireless link to a
different ISP

There is clearly a market for business interruption insurance to cover both
electricity and itnernet failures

--
Graham J

In article <4b8fc093$0$2538$(E-Mail Removed)>, graham@invalid
says...
>
> The general difficulty is that broadband over ADSL was never designed as a
> reliable service for businesses. It was a "best effort" exploitation of the
> idiosyncracies of the "last mile" telephone pair to get something that would
> work without needing a baseband modem. By contrast ISDN uses something of
> the same capabilities of the telephone pair but was conceived at the outset
> as a business grade service.
>
> So what is available is a "domestic" product which is priced accordingly.
> It is true that some ISPs will offer Service Level Agreements but these are
> hamstrung by the need to rely on the BT infrastructure and service
> personnel.
>

I remember the discussions which took place as the services were being
planned. The primary assumption was that businesses would require SDSL.

ADSL by its nature (asymmetric) was aimed sqarely at the consumer
market. These considerations seem to have been forgotten somewhere along
the line.