At approximately 01:35 this morning, the broadband service in Leadhills and Wanlockhead failed, affecting apparently, most if not all of both villages. By 10:15, this outage had been extended to include Sanquhar and surrounding areas, affecting five or six local exchanges. Service was restored at approximately 12:45.
As with previous outages, getting the concession that there was a wide area issue, was not straight forward, with a number of users being told by BT Customer Support that they were unaware of a major outage, despite the BT status line (0800 169 0199) indicating the opposite. My own ISP (Newnet/Timico) was not updated with information until 13:09, having been told a few hours earlier that no major outage had been identified. Conflicting information.
In response to this latest outage, villagers have set up a Facebook group to publicise previous and future events affecting our broadband service – “Leadhills Broadband Action Group“. The purpose of the group is to keep villagers’, their friends and families apprised of developments and also to raise wider public awareness of the issues faced by small communities, when dealing with BT. The availability of reliable information and being listened to remain our major concerns and it is our hope that local people will support this group by posting their experiences there – we intend to take the PR war to BT.
Until cable is installed in our villages, we will remain at the mercy of BT, so there is no room for complacency. This latest outage was fixed quickly, but one wonders if this only happened because several thousand other households were affected. Please support our group by posting your thoughts and experiences and sharing them widely.
The letter of complaint sent to BT Customer Services Manager on 22nd April, has not attracted a formal response other than a brief call from BT Business; the caller was interested only in business customers. This represents still more reason to get involved as BT seems to ignore complaints from home users; we need to make our complaints where they will be seen by thousands.