Business telecommunications and IT systems

Major BT duct is crushed

Contractors using a tunnelling machine unexpectedly ground their way through a major BT underground service duct under the Olympic village near Ilford, East London, creating a loss of service to customers from 2pm, Saturday 4 April until late afternoon on 15 April 2009.

Described as an 'Olympic sized problem', the thrust borer struck 'an unchartered obstruction', destroying some of BT's major trunk copper and fibre optic cables, bringing communication chaos and localised London traffic jams as computer controlled traffic light systems were disrupted.

The machine had apparently found one of BT's major network cable tunnels, severing, according to one source, 1,186 cables, two of which were 622Mbps IPStream circuits.

Within moments, complaints were being received from customers as they lost the ability to make or receive phone calls, mobile calls, or use broadband. Vodafone kept their subscribers up to date with text messages.

The problems were felt by BT, other major Telecom providers, mobile companies including Vodaphone, Broadband suppliers, as well as remote connections to traffic light signals causing traffic jams within some parts of London. The emergency services were also effected.

Capacity Issues

Although work was immediately begun to restore service, traffic capacity was severely limited resulting in what appeared to be planned outages as capacity was taken from one area to benefit another.

For example, broadband seemed to be rationed at times between Wales and Scotland. Voice calls were effected as far afield as Lincoln.

The network engaged tones (a longer and a shorter beep), no dial tone, and no inbound calls were typical of the voice issues, which seemed to vary according to the time of day, across the UK as capacity was shared out.