Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[sevenlayermuddle]

My vodafone mobile phone's been failing to register with the network since early this am.  Other half's (also vodafone) registers, but can't make any calls.   

Seems I'm not alone, lot's of reports of a widespread failure, seemingly attributed to a break-in.  Here's just one example report... 

http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/28/vodafones-uk-network-taken-down-by-a-break-in-at-its-basingstok

I haven't the slightest doubt that the vodafone network will have suitable redundancy to protect it's critical servers, so I find it very hard to believe that a single point of failure, as a reasonable outcome from a break-in, tells the whole story.  It'll be interesting to see if a full explanation is ever forthcoming....

[geep]

Somebody stole a load of servers and routers from our local unmanned Virgin Media centre last October.
Just knocked a hole in the building's wall and grabbed the stuff. "Up to 30,000 broadband customers" affected. And heard on the news the other day about a police station that was broken into on the day they launched a householder home security awareness campaign.

Cheers,
Peter

[kitz]

El Reg had a bit more info on this


Vodafone's Monday morning outage was caused by thieves who broke into the operator's Basingstoke exchange and lifted a load of switches.

The break-in happened around 00.30 this morning, and the police were quickly notified. Vodafone noticed its own network collapsing and assembled its "War Room" which is supposed to deal with network outages.

The problems have now been fixed, but customers will be asking why such critical kit was vulnerable, and why it took almost 12 hours to get a formal statement from the company.

The company's Twitter feed was uncharacteristically silent on the matter, while its website showed no information and the phone lines were overloaded. That left customers wondering if the problem was with their own handset or the local base station, but unlikely to imagine the problem covered most of South East England.

Vodafone tells us that only 100,000 customers were affected, rather than the millions that were rumoured to be having problems this morning. Those 100,000 are obviously a very vocal bunch, though, as the internet is awash with disgruntled customers complaining about their wasted morning.

Quite why that morning was wasted we still don't know. Vodafone is only saying that it was a break-in, and have confirmed that switching equipment was stolen (putting paid to rumours of midnight protests, which were already undermined by the lack of statement from any protesters).

It seems that considerable force was used to gain access to the site, but we'll have to wait for the police statement before we know more. ®

[sevenlayermuddle]

Interesting, and nice to be reassured that I'm part of 'a very vocal bunch'  .  Yeah.  

In fact it was about 6pm before I was able to make outgoing calls again. Worrying really, we tend to assume that if the car breaks down or the house catches fire, help is just a phone call away....  

I guess it's easy to forget that the mobile networks seem to have no real aspirations to the 'five nines' (99.999% availability) that is often quoted as a benchmark for phone networks, which is about 5 minutes service loss in a year.   I'm still surprised they had any critical network component in a single location (Basingstoke).   I'd have expected the core components to be running in some kind of fault-tolerant mode, failing over to a backup in some other town, some miles away.  Disappointing.

_{Edit: 'some miles away'.  Originally said 'hundreds of miles away', which was something of an exaggeration.}

[waltergmw]

Sadly,

The public is usually very tolerant of these situations except 7LM !

We seem to have a very low expectation of cellular systems, probably because we haven't observed that better is possible.
Ask yourselves what happens after a major accident in an area or just how much power back up is available at a node ?

Kind regards,
Walter

[sevenlayermuddle]

The public is usually very tolerant of these situations except 7LM !

I'm feeling more and more appreciated, this morning.   

It's actually a field of technology that I have worked in, and it's very difficult to sell telecoms switching equipment to the CPs unless it supports fault-tolerant mode.  Indeed, the 'gold standard' is that not only does the service continue in the event of failure, but also that calls already in progress are rerouted and continue without disruption.   

It is extremely difficult however to support multiple concurrent points of failure, since that prevents the network from conclusively determining exactly what has failed.  I'm just speculating but, given it happened in the wee small hours, could Vodafone maybe have had the backup-systems down for maintenance?