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[Bowdon]

BT Openreach Maintenance Woes Affect ISPs in Northern Scotland

Customers of Sky Broadband and possibly a few other ISPs in the North of Scotland may be experiencing sporadic connectivity problems with their broadband and phone services today, which appears to have been caused by BTOpenreach’s “over-running network maintenance.”

The problem, which has manifested as a multiple exchange outage, began after around 5-6am this morning and affects a large number of areas in the Northern part of Scotland (predominantly the wide area between Inverness and Aberdeen).

According to Sky (9:58am), “The fault has been caused by over-running network maintenance. We’re working with our suppliers to fix this as quickly as possible and we’re sorry for any inconvenience caused.” Sky’s telephone support agents appear to be pointing the finger of blame firmly at the feet of BT, although by that they mean Openreach.

We’ve asked Openreach to clarify what went wrong with their planned maintenance.

[Chrysalis]

cue the replies about how bad the ring system is vs mesh.

[kitz]

I doubt it would make that much difference.  Somewhere >150 miles north of Edinburgh is hardly likely to be anywhere near the main ring or the Core.  This sounds like it could one of their main backhauls to Inverness and I doubt even BTw's 21CN would have that much more redundancy up there.

What I do find far more strange is the fact that this made a news article.  Outages are a routine event, you only have to look on their twitter feed to see that area outages are practically a daily event.. some lasting ~ 24hrs eg their one in south wales a few days ago.

Same with BT 21CN - it happens! We had an MSO around here a couple of months ago being an over-run of scheduled maintenance which latest >12hrs.   It took all fibre out not just on my exchange but a whole area with nothing reported on ISPr. Yet according to the ISPr article, the finger pointing had started by 10am. 

[Weaver]

No problems here in Skye. Too far west to be in the affected area?

[kitz]

You wouldn't be affected anyway Weaver.  It only affected Sky backhaul (and anyone using them for transit) some where between Aberdeen and Inverness (Huntly).   The BTw backhauls are fine.

That's why I was so surprised them making a big deal out of this one.   They routinely have problems, some which last longer and several times per week - just look at their twitter feed.

[niemand]

cue the replies about how bad the ring system is vs mesh.

Elaborate please? Not sure I understand relevance or message?

[Chrysalis]

Ignition I simply meant it will be pointed out sky had the outage because they dont use a mesh network.

[niemand]

Ah I see.

This was caused because they were using daisy chaining. Had they used a ring they would have been fine, traffic would have just flowed in the other direction.

No-one uses meshes for point to point links; most of the capacity would be wasted and the odds of losing both directions on a ring simultaneously are very low indeed.

EDIT: Having a look at a map you can see why. To make this work Sky almost certainly have a single daisy chain going in between Inverness and Aberdeen stopping off at exchanges collecting customers along the way.

I'm not sure if anyone uses meshing to any extent at least. Us city-dwellers are possibly on rings, the exchange I connect through has east and west connections on both TalkTalk and BT Wholesale, no idea about Sky and think it might be single-homed straight to the backbone site, but for the most part with the exception of BTW people will be on daisy chains.

[Chrysalis]

Ok thanks for the reasoning it makes sense.

[niemand]

Every day should be a school day