Hull Daily Mail: Kcom apologises after firms hit out at costly Internet blackout

[Fastethernet]

Thousands of residents and businesses in Hull were left without Internet access for hours after Kcom suffered a network failure.

Firms were counting the cost today after the broadband blackout over the weekend affected Karoo customers.

The failure occurred at 3pm on Saturday and was not rectified until 11pm.

Some large businesses and organisations, including Hull and East Yorkshire Hospital NHS Trust, escaped the problems because they have independent networks.

But Adrian Eves, a Hull-based business manager for Panasonic Europe, said the company had suffered.

He said: "This will have cost local businesses thousands of pounds.

"I am extremely angry and frustrated with Kcom.

"In my job, I have to communicate with factories and offices in China, Japan, the US and Germany."

Dave Beasley, managing director of Classlane Media, a video production company based in Hessle, called for more choice of Internet suppliers for the city.

He said: "I came in specially on the Saturday only to find the Internet wasn't working.

"We had clients expecting to see a DVD on Sunday, but that was not feasible after the Internet went down.

"Our deadlines haven't moved, but we lost a full day's work, so it was hugely inconvenient for us.

"We are moving to Newport, near Howden, soon and we were jumping for joy that we will have other suppliers there."

KCom, with its offices based in Carr Lane, Hull, apologised for any inconvenience the network failure may have caused their customers.

A spokeswoman said: "We had a significant network failure on Saturday starting at about 3pm with service being restored at almost 11pm.

"Working with our suppliers, Nortel and Cisco, we isolated the issue to restore the service.

"We are working with our suppliers to understand the exact root cause of the issue and ensure the appropriate actions are taken to mitigate the risk of it happening again."

http://www.thisishullandeastriding.co.uk/news/Kcom-apologises-firms-hit-costly-Internet-blackout/article-262605-detail/article.html

Good work HDM.

[alimonkey]

Lol, you beat me to it, I just registered here this morning to come and have a winge about this (so mad it forced me out of lurking).  Right everyone, hit the HDM website with your worst 

[stormy]

Heh, yeh bad press for KC is always welcome, especially when its totally justified like this. Its just a pity that not much is ever going to change, and KC can sit pretty in that knowledge.

[richardmyers]

Hmmmm perhaps I'm going senile in my not-so-old age, but wasn't there a truly catastrophic outage in January/February which we received an apology for and was promised it would never happen again? Oh yes, now I remember, there was!

Luckily I was away in Northern Ireland with my girlfriend however I couldn't check my trusty Karoo email address and (how brilliant) I obviously couldn't even access the Karoo status page to see what the heck was going on. Since the outage it seems, as usual, Karoo aren't at all bothered by this. The pseudo apology mocks us, because there's nothing we can do anyway. All in all it's a disgrace.

P.S.
Excellent forum, been looking for somewhere to moan about Karoo for a while now.

[Hobbisbang]

just something i posted to HDM and the residents of Hull and surrounding


Looking at the comments I have to agree the understanding of digital communications in Hull is one of Facebook porn and email. But what can you expect!!!
Social conditioning of bigots and wingers. KCom are killing this city socially and economically. And if one or two of you are happy with the little insular world you live in then good on you. you have a right to decide how you live your life.

Fact KCom are incompetent.

1, why do the upgrade in the working day (all the 9 to 5ers shut up)
2, why didn’t they have a project plan that had regression and fall over planning.
3, why say some customer when it was all
4, tel-helth remote monitoring of at risk people via ADSL went down!!!
5, OFcom are ineffectual
6, KCom is a virtual monopoly

If anyone disagrees that is your right but HULL is the communications arsehole of the UK. it will change the question is will the plebs with no vision ever change or continue to be rock dwellers.