Orange broadband hit by outages

[Scoobs]

The broadband service run by mobile firm Orange is experiencing a "major" national outage.

The problem occurred on Monday afternoon, affecting 100,000 broadband subscribers at its peak.

A spokesperson for the company said the fault on the service, formerly known as Wanadoo, was caused by a "network equipment failure".

Orange said they were working to fix the problem but there is no indication when a normal service will resume.

The BBC news website was alerted to the fault by a reader who had been unable to connect to the internet for the last two days.

Local failures

Orange confirmed that there had been broadband network outage that started at approximately 16:00 yesterday.

The company said the problem only affected customers within their Local Loop Unbundled (LLU) network.

LLUs use equipment installed in a telephone exchange by a third party company, such as Orange, instead of BT.

Orange have 2 million internet subscribers, one million of which use the company's broadband service. 10% of its broadband users are on an LLU network.

"By 800 this morning we had restored 30% of that service leaving 7% of our total Broadband customers without connectivity," said an Orange spokesperson.

By 1600 today they hope to have restored 50% of connections, leaving 50,000 Broadband customers without connectivity.

"We are working to restore normal service to all customers as quickly as possible," said the spokesperson. "We apologise to those customers affected."

The latest broadband service status report on the Orange website said the service was "up and running at the moment," but the report was dated August 2006.

Orange started offering broadband earlier this year after the company absorbed internet service provider Wanadoo - also owned by Orange's parent, France Telecom.

Orange offers a "triple play" package to its customers which bundles mobile phone, landline and broadband services as an all-in-one deal.

Source BBC

[DavidMad]

Yeah but, click the broadband link at the top of this page and you get
Aug 2006
broadband service status
The service is up and running at the moment

Helpful eh?

DM

[Scoobs]

It shows as status orange with the following text.

October 2006
broadband service status
Orange can confirm that a broadband network outage occurred yesterday Monday 16th October at approximately 16:00.

Only customers within our LLU network areas were affected and the outage was caused by a network equipment failure. We are working with our engineers and suppliers to rectify the problem as quickly as possible. Service was restored to more than 20% of affected customers overnight and will resume for more customers exchange by exchange throughout the day. We are working to restore normal service to all customers as quickly as possible.

We apologise to those customers affected.

[Zer02004]

Just to confirm:

[DavidMad]

Aaah, they have eventually updated it - I was still getting the August message as did the BBC reporter here.

It's a bit bizarre that it was two months old anyway, "Service Status" pages should be reliable to be the first point of call whenever customers have difficulties - one of my friends was playing around with wireless, routers etc for a couple of hours having got someone to check the status page. (Didn't click the link to get at the August message

Ho hum.

DM