Flood and Fire in Paddington affects Broadband

Burne House (courtesy of Google streetview)

A central London network node belonging to BT disastrously flooded and caught fire yesterday.

The incident at Burne House in north Paddington affected landlines, broadband and mobile services across the west of London. Over  400 local exchanges are connected from this site, so connectivity was also affected across the south east and further afield.

“The flood water has been removed from the exchange building overnight and power supply has begun to be restored,” BT said this morning.

“We are now beginning to restore communications services to customers and this work will continue throughout the day.”

The impact of the great torrent/inferno was even felt on the continent. There have been reports that roaming for Vodafone, O2 and 3 customers in Austria is currently down, with operators pointing the finger at Paddington.

Read more at TheRegister

Internet Updates

Network Meeting

Last week we had the opportunity to catch up with our fellow network operators. Amongst the interesting topics discussed were IP address depletion updates – suggestions that broadband providers might NAT their entire customer bases!

As most users have NAT on their broadband already, this effectively means double NAT – if you rely on a fixed IP address to the outside world, this has major consequences.

If you’re one of our broadband customers, we’d like to hear what you think. Let us know.

We also enjoyed a humourous talk on care of fibre optic cables. Unfortunately the detailed warnings on only using specialised cleaning equipment costing thousands of dollars was left a little deflated after a quick wipe on someone’s jeans gave excellent results!

From dirty to clean via trousers