BT's Colossus's knees wobble

Is this its Achilles' heel?

By Tim Richardson • Get more from this author

Posted in Broadband, 27th November 2001 10:31 GMT

Free whitepaper – Hands on with Hyper-V 3.0 and virtual machine movement

BT's broadband network wobbled again on Friday afternoon after its Colossus IP network was floored by a recurrent software problem.

Friday's incident was much more minor than the outage which hit Colossus last Tuesday (when thousands of the UK's ADSL users were left without Net access).

BT has put a temporary fix in place until a permanent solution can be found for the problem.

The network fell over at around 2.50pm on Friday afternoon although it was partially restored within a couple of minutes. BT claims that Colossus was "fully stable" less than an hour later.

A number of ISPs experience difficulties on Friday although the picture is by no means clear.

A spokeswoman for Exeter-based Eclipse said that it did experience some problems, although not on the same scale as Tuesday's network failure.

She said not all ADSL users were hit and that problems were sporadic.

This latest "wobble" with BT's ADSL network has done little for confidence in broadband.

Last week, Pierre Danon, the head of BT Retail, told a conference in Montpellier that BT's ADSL service levels were "mediocre", according to a report by VNUNet. ®