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Category: IT News

Major BE/O2 Outage

As of yesterday morning BE Broadband and O2 Broadband were experiencing massive routing issues with a significant portion of traffic. Some websites and services were loading fine, others completely dead. User @bestatus on Twitter was regularly posting updates to the problem until around 4pm yesterday and we’ve had no more updates from them since.

It looks like a major fibre connection has gone down, with BE Broadband’s twitter feed saying:

Services such as Amazon’s AWS (cloud computing) and Sony’s Playstation Network are currently unable to be used if you’re on one of the affected ISPs. We’re monitoring BeThere’s status pages and twitter feed for updates.

Are you or someone you know affected by this? Let us know in the comments below!

Update from BeThere at 10:53 on Tuesday 28th August 2012:

August 28, 2012
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Virgin Media broadband down

Virgin Media Broadband Outage

Lots of users have been commenting that this evening Virgin Medias broadband and TV on demand service have been unavailable. Twitter is full of people in the Edinburgh area with problems at present.

Phoning 150 from a Virgin landline and then confirming puts the user in a queue that then cuts them off with a “the other person has cleared” message.

Latest updates

20:08: one user reports their Virgin Media Super Hub restarted and now has a completely new firmware and web interface loaded onto it. He reports Internet being back up and online again.

 

More Updates as they happen.

August 15, 2012
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Edinburgh EFM – Ethernet in the First Mile

EFM: Mind blowingly fast connectivity

UPDATE: CONSIDER IT NO LONGER OFFERS EFM AS A STANDARD PRODUCT. EFM IS ONLY UTILISED AS A STOP-GAP WHERE ETHERNET FIBRE CIRCUITS ARE DELAYED. 

Consider IT are pleased to announce their new offering of Ethernet in the First Mile internet connectivity to businesses in and around Edinburgh, the Lothians, Fife and beyond. Bridges the gap between cheap connections and much more expensive high end Optical Fibre connections. Perfect for businesses with more than 5 concurrent users, or businesses who make heavy use of their internet connection an EFM connection is perfect for your needs.

With prices starting from just £180 per month, Consider IT are one of the most competitive providers of EFM to hit Scotland. Contracts ranging from just 1 year to 3 year mean you’re able to make flexible decisions on your connectivity that are right for your business.

We also guarantee throughput when you receive your quote, meaning that you’ll get at least that speed or you can cancel with no obligation!

For less than £6 a day, your business can get a super fast, symmetrical (meaning both the upload and download speeds are the same),  connection.

August 2, 2012
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Virgin Media and others blocking the Pirate Bay

Virgin Media along with various other ISPs are now actively blocking the Pirate Bay website. Last week the UK High Court ruled that several of the country’s leading ISPs must block subscriber access to The Pirate Bay, and so the censorship by our country of what websites we are and aren’t allowed to visit begins.

In the order, the judge Mr Justice Arnold told Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, O2 and Everything Everywhere to begin blocking access to The Pirate Bay.

A sixth ISP, BT, requested “a few more weeks” to consider their position on blocking the site.

Virgin Media said in a statement: “Virgin Media has received an order from the courts requiring it to prevent access to The Pirate Bay in order to help protect against copyright infringement.

“As a responsible ISP, Virgin Media complies with court orders addressed to the company but strongly believes that changing consumer behaviour to tackle copyright infringement also needs compelling legal alternatives, such as our agreement with Spotify, to give consumers access to great content at the right price.”

Mr Justice Arnold said in a written judgment in February: “In my judgment, the operators of [The Pirate Bay] do authorise its users’ infringing acts of copying and communication to the public. They go far beyond merely enabling or assisting.

“I conclude that both users and the operators of [The Pirate Bay] infringe the copyrights of the claimants … in the UK.”

May 3, 2012
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BT recovers from “major business broadband problem”

Edinburgh IT Support company Consider IT reports a few of its clients were left without Internet this morning when BT suffered a major business broadband problem.

BT Business’ Twitter feed said the problem was fixed at 11.30 GMT, and advised users to restart their routers to get connected.

One user of TheRegister.co.uk posts:

Had this this morning.

At first, it was the ADSL Authentication failing on two ADSL2+ lines we have. That went away quite quickly, though, and has been replaced by a completely useless authenticated session that won’t shift traffic at all (literally, even a ping only hears silence). Both lines seem to be the same.

I switched us onto our emergency 3G stick which handles the traffic well for about a day before we hit limits, but the two business ADSL lines are still out of commission.

Shall I demonstrate how reliable BT are as a business provider?

My employers asked me to build a device that can automatically cut the power to the two routers we have, wait 30 seconds and restore power to them (and then restart networking scripts, etc.) at the order of a special text message (coincidentally to the same stick we use for emergency 3G access). It happens that often that our one-and-only VPN user actually “hard-reboots” the routers via text on a regular basis when his VPN software can’t connect.

Our two lines aren’t even stable enough to just run off one most of the time, I had to implement a very fancy failover / connection balancing system using a Linux router to get some sort of stability. Even then, about once a week the local exchange (50 yards away) decides to kill one or more of our sessions and we have to reconnect (via hard power off described above) for no visible reason.

Click here to see the post

The BT Broadband status page reads:

We have recently had a problem affecting Business IP addresses and it may be necessary to reboot your router.

Please power down your router & PC for a minimum of 30 seconds before reconnecting.

Once your router and PC have restarted, attempt to reconnect. We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience.

January 20, 2012
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Virgin Media UK broadband failure resolved

Some Edinburgh customers told us they had been affected.

Virgin Media has said that services around the UK are now fully restored following a nationwide failure.

Virgin Media apologised to their customers for Tuesday’s blip and said that the issue had now been fully resolved.

The problems arise just as Virgin Media plans to increase speeds to most of its customers. Over the next 18 months, Virgin Media plans to double most of its customers internet speeds.

If you have still not been able to connect, please try powering down your Cable modem for five minutes and then start it back up and wait a few minutes for the connection to re-establish.

 

January 18, 2012
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Thousands of BT Broadband customers down and out

BT has confirmed that a power outage has led to thousands of its customers being offline nationwide. The broadband network went offline this morning, with BT announcing the issue via Twitter.

BT’s customer services team, BT Care, confirmed that there was an ongoing problem with BT Broadband connections. “We’re aware that a number of you are unable to get online … We’re sorry about this & will keep you updated.”

Customers have reported problems from as far afield as Belfast, Edinburgh, Swansea and London

October 3, 2011
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Edinburgh VOIP Solutions

Consider IT is pleased to announce that we now offer VOIP solutions to all businesses in the Edinburgh area and beyond.

After a year of extensive testing with a handful of select clients, we are pleased to confirm we can offer a reliable, redundant, and exceptional quality telephone service.

Businesses in Edinburgh can now cut their telephone costs and reduce their long-term commitments with current analogue providers by switching to our VOIP service.

For more information, click onto our Edinburgh VOIP page here.

September 26, 2011
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Consider IT becomes Google Apps Authorized Reseller!

Consider IT are pleased to announce that we have now become authorised resellers of the Google Apps suite of communication and collaboration tools for businesses.  Google Apps brings simple, powerful communication and collaboration tools to organizations of any size – all hosted by Google to streamline setup, minimize maintenance, and reduce IT costs.


With Gmail (including Google email security, powered by Postini), Google Calendar, and integrated IM, users can stay connected and work together with ease. And, using Google Docs and Google Sites, which include word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and website creation tools, they can share files and collaborate in real-time, keeping versions organized and available wherever and whenever users work.

“The Google Apps Reseller program will help us provide Google Apps to users of businesses in Edinburgh and the surrounding areas.” Said Stuart Gilbertson, Managing Director, Consider IT. “Google Apps for Business offers a broad set of powerful APIs that enable us to deploy redundant, scalable, reliable and secure services that replace the ancient solutions most businesses still struggle to use today.”

“Once we’ve set it all up, everything really does just work. It might take a bit of getting used to, but with our training and support, our clients will be increasing their productivity and working with their new systems with ease.

Silly things like the collaboration between multiple people at the same time on their documents makes life so much easier and people so much more productive. Google Apps just saves businesses money and time whilst being secure and safe, it’s as simple as that.”

The Google Apps Reseller program includes resellers, consultants and independent software vendors that sell, service and customize Google Apps for Business for their customers. Consider IT received training, support and deployment services from Google, as well as access to APIs for integrating Google Apps into their customers’ business operations. Consider IT is now able to retain an even closer relationship with their customers in order to provide additional service and support. The businesses receiving Google Apps will benefit from the additional attention to their specific needs.

Ten reasons to use Google Apps

  1. You need a productivity solution that doesn’t require the ongoing maintenance of desktop software.
  2. You want a solution that meets your needs today and automatically gets better over time.
  3. You need a productivity solution that you can rely on.
  4. You need technology that was built with security in mind.
  5. Your employees need to collaborate seamlessly across organisational, geographical and linguistic barriers.
  6. You want your employees to move faster without being slowed down by inflexible technology.
  7. Your employees need to use a wide range of mobile phones and tablets including Android, Blackberry, iPhone and Windows Mobile.
  8. My employees need to do more from mobile devices than just send emails.
  9. You a cost-effective solution that is reliable and predictable.
  10. I want to save money whilst increasing my reliability.
August 25, 2011
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Edinburgh Virgin Media users incorrectly told “It’s your computer at fault”

AN UPDATE FROM VIRGIN MEDIA HAS BEEN GIVEN. CLICK HERE TO JUMP STRAIGHT TO IT.

Customers of Virgin Media’s cable broadband services in Edinburgh are today up in arms at their 30Mb and 50Mb services crawling at only 1Mb. Instead of receiving “The UK’s fastest broadband”, users of the affected service are coming in at speeds slower than 60% of the UK population.

Our Managing Director, Stuart Gilbertson, is also affected by this service issue and had the pleasure of dealing with Virgin Media’s call centres abroad.

“I phoned them up at about 7pm this evening (18th August) to complain about the fact my Internet connection had deteriorated to a level that just wasn’t acceptable any more. We pay a considerable sum to Virgin Media every month for our Television, Broadband and Phone and we expect a premium service as a result of the premiums we pay.

I was eventually able to guess the correct keypad entries to get through to speak to someone about the problem. I explained quite clearly that all the devices we use at home were affected (two laptops, an iPad, and a couple of mobile phones with WiFi) and the lady set up a remote session to my laptop to try and resolve the issue.”

Stuart goes on to say:

“At first, she seemed to know what she was doing by going into the management console of our Router in the house, but then it quickly became apparent she had absolutely no idea whatsoever. She changed a setting in the Wireless section even though I was quite clear that the fault was happening on devices connected with the ethernet cable too.

She then made changes to other settings and ran SpeedTest.net speed tests a few times in a vain attempt to get to the bottom of the problem. Eventually she came to the conclusion that the problem was my Anti-Virus (ignoring the fact all other devices on the network were experiencing the slow Internet connection too). This just wasn’t the case. I use AVG Free at home on the laptop, which is a free anti-virus solution we recommend for personal users. This Anti-Virus doesn’t require a subscription, so it doesn’t expire.

Eventually I gave up and refused to speak to her any longer. I spoke to a Manager and he decided to send us a new router in the post – even though we’re pretty sure the problem is at VirginMedia’s end, rather than the home user’s.”

Consider IT are very worried that users in the Edinburgh area who may be affected by this will be wrongly told that the fault is with their home desktop computer or laptop. This just simply isn’t the case.

The Virgin Media forums were alive and kicking with numerous posts about the issue and a considerable number of users in Edinburgh showing their concern about their own connection speed issues.  http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Up-to-30Mb-and-50Mb-broadband/Edinburgh-50Mb-real-speeds/td-p/659049

Anyone in the Edinburgh area should if possible, be assertive on the phone to these people in that there’s a much higher chance the problem is at Virgin Media’s end rather than yours. If your Internet drops off at about 4pm and comes back to normal speeds by 2am the next day, then this is almost certainly the case.

Do not be conned into having your computer “fixed”. There is nothing wrong with it! Virgin Media’s telephone technicians are just following a very very badly planned script which potentially could have costly and unnecessary consequences.

Virgin Media have made no official comment on their website. At time of publishing this blog post, their Edinburgh status still showed that Broadband Service was “good”.

[Update 09:23am 19/08/2011] – Virgin Media’s Service Status still says “There are no known problems affecting your Broadband service.”

[Update 11:10 19/08/2011] – Virgin Media have given us an update to this issue:

“This problem is being investigated under fault reference F001708058. A hardware fault in the Manchester backbone has been identified and the defective equipment has been replaced. This will be tested during the day. Even if this is not a complete solution it will improve the situation.

A second, potential, explanation for the problem is also being investigated. This would have an impact on traffic which follows a particular routing path and would not be apparent during periods of low network load – during the day. It would become manifest as load increases – during the evening. As yet we do not know if this is the explanation, nor whether a fix will be in place before this evening.

We will be monitoring progress on this fault during the day and will re-post as and when we have anything further to report.”

Are you in the Edinburgh area and experiencing the same problems with your Virgin Media connection? Leave a comment on this page and we’ll show Virgin Media the problem is widespread!

August 18, 2011
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