The Newark telephone exchange suffered an outage today and quite a number of analog lines and ADSLs were down as a result. Fortunately Timico has a network strategy that incorporates multiple types of connectivity specifically to provide resilience when outages like this happen.
It did prompt me to check out how often BT has problems at an exchange and I found that in the last seven days there were nineteen major service outages. Anywhere technology is involved is bound to lead to things going wrong. If you extrapolate the last week’s outages to a whole year then you get a figure of nine hundred and eighty eight which says that approximately one in six of the UK’s telephone exchanges has a problem in any given year.
Whilst this is not a definitive number in my mind it is good enough to tell me that a business needs to have a disaster recovery/contingency plan to cater for network outages. We mustr be unlucky in Newark because last summer we had another outage. That time our ISDN lines were down for the afternoon. Allegedly some equipment was switched off to prevent the exchange from over heating on a hot day!