Outage at BT cuts off millions

From...

February 29, 2000
Web posted at: 8:15 a.m. EST (1315 GMT)

by Polly Sprenger

(IDG) -- A fault on British Telecom's network prevented customers from dialing in to hundreds of free Internet service providers, potentially affecting millions of Internet users.

Nearly 2 million Britons hold accounts with free ISPs, which have blossomed in the last two years in response to prohibitively expensive Internet access.

The fault occurred mid-morning Friday, when two of the gateways serving 0800 and 0845 numbers ö used by most of Britain's more than 200 free ISPs ö crashed. As the network struggled to reroute calls and BT engineers struggled to repair the fault, lines became so congested that only a fraction of calls got through. Failure of this network is tantamount to a crash of the 800-number system in the U.S.

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The crash further damages BT's already less-than-pristine standing with the Internet community. BT has come under fire from Internet businesses and the British government lately for charging consumers by the minute for time spent online. E-commerce advocates say this practice has prevented Internet business from taking off there the way it has in the U.S.

A BT spokeswoman said the company doesn't know the exact percentage of calls that have failed, and called the fault "a serious problem that we are working urgently to fix." The first attempt to fix the problem in mid-afternoon failed, as the same two gateways crashed immediately after being restored.

"If you can't get through, the intelligent network tries another route," said BT's spokeswoman, who declined to be named. "The calls were spilling over and causing congestion in other areas."

Although BT's main network was unaffected, the so-called "derived services" network that handles toll-free and ISP calls was sluggish and virtually impassable for most of the day.

Free ISPs use a numbering convention that starts all numbers 0845. This charges customers a local rate regardless of their physical location. Charging local rates for national calls is BT's compromise to promote Internet usage in a country that has only about 10 percent of its citizenry online, compared with 30 percent in the U.S. Last week, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown publicly called on BT to revise its charges for Internet usage, prompting the telco to issue a statement saying Brown should not become involved in telecom issues.

Netscape Online, the second-largest free ISP in Britain, says it hasn't received large numbers of complaints about the failure, although spokesman Matthew Peacock points out that its customer service line is a toll free 0800 number, serviced by the same network as 0845.

Freeserve, Britain's largest ISP, did not respond to requests for comment.

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