BT Broadband Outage Hits 20,000 Homes

BT said on Monday that it has fixed a fault that left more than 20,000 UK households without broadband over the weekend.

The problem, which began on Friday night at about 7pm, affected areas including Northern England, Northern Ireland, Southern Scotland and the Highlands and Islands, BT said.

The outage was due to a problem at BT’s Edinburgh node, which also caused a day-long outage in September. Some homes lost telephone as well as broadband service, according to BT.

Some homes saw their services restored by 7am on Saturday, but problems carried through until late on Saturday night for some areas, according to BT.

BT investing in fibre

The outage comes at a time when BT is boosting its efforts to deploy super-fast fibre-based broadband services across the country. At the beginning of October, for example, the telco launched a competition designed to assess the demand for fibre optic broadband in different areas of the country by gathering votes from potential subscribers.

Back in May, BT pledged to invest £2.5 billion in rolling out fibre to around two thirds of UK homes by 2015. The company still plans to manage this deployment within its current level of capital expenditure. However, BT executives have stressed that public sector support will be required for exchanges in the “final third” of the UK, where deploying fibre is not commercially viable.

As part of the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review last month, Chancellor George Osborne pledged to invest £530 million to support the UK’s broadband network and to enable the roll out of superfast broadband in areas that the private sector would not otherwise reach. Superfast broadband pilot projects will also be carried out in North Yorkshire, Cumbria, Herefordshire, and the Highlands and Islands, the government said.