BT Openreach outage brings down UK competitive ISP broadband services

An outage at BT Openreach's (NYSE: BT) Stepney Green (London) exchange has disrupted service for a number of its wholesale broadband ISP customers.

Around 8:40 AM UK time, Openreach's copper based ADSL/ADSL2+ broadband lines started to drop because of an unknown issue with the Stepney Green host link.

What's significant about the Stepney Green telephone exchange is that it serves as a major interconnection point for a number of competitive ISPs like PlusNet to deliver services to their respective customers.

Users who are experiencing problems getting online have been advised to shut off their modem for a couple of minutes and then turn it back on to connect.  

This is not the only time that BT Openreach's network has affected its wholesale customers' broadband service capabilities. In May, a fiber cut caused by what BT says was "malicious damage" to one of its 240 fiber cables located 100 meters away from its Harlow-based Fibrenet site caused service disruptions to broadband customers of three competitive providers: O2, Be Broadband and AAISP.

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