Pub o' clock comes early for C&W biz customers silenced by titsup phones
Inbound calls swallowed by black hole
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Business customers of Vodafone-owned Cable & Wireless have been complaining about the telecoms outfit this morning after it was hit by a major outage apparently affecting the whole of the UK.
The Register understands that punters are unable to receive inbound calls to the category of numbers whose prefix includes 0800 and 0845.
When anyone dials those numbers, recorded messages are returned saying either: "This number is busy" or "This number is blocked".
A source told us that the system has been down since around 8am and that an engineer was apparently dispatched by C&W to Glasgow to try to fix the problem by replacing some hardware.
Another engineer from Ericsson is said to be restoring the Edinburgh connection. Apparently, customers affected can prefix their calls with 1280 to route outbound calls while C&W fixes its network.
The latest reports from biz punters blighted by the problem suggests that the work won't be completed until mid-afternoon at the earliest.
Outage could lead to early start in pub for some
El Reg asked C&W to comment on this story. A spokesman told us that only a limited number of customers were affected by the outage. "We've got people looking at it right now and we hope to have it fixed soon." ®
COMMENTS
Re: Email that I jut got from CW
@ thermionic
Where did we put those 1.4MB floppies?
C&W
The British government had two Telecoms monopolies. British Telecom had the UK market and Cable and Wireless had the Commonwealth countries. C&W have a long history in telecoms. Their current UK business is partly self built and partly made up of other businesses they've bought over time - I think (but I'm not sure) that they include Thus, Energis and the corporate telecoms part of NTL. There's not much call for telegraphs these days so to stay in business they would have had to move into Telecoms anyway to survive.
08xx numbers use the Intelligent Network - an add on to the PSTN. It lets companies control call routing between call centres, use time of day routing and re-route in case of congestion. It gives you a level of control that you can't get using geographic numbers routed over the standard PSTN.
I really don't understand WHAT this penchant is for 08xx numbers anyway. Just use a normal geographic landline from a real phone company. Cable and Wireless were a worldwide telegraph outfit, what they're doing with phonelines, I have no idea
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