Tunnel Fire Tests BC Readiness in UK - Many Firms Fail!

A fire last week in a Manchester, England cabling tunnel owned by British Telecom (BT) tested the readiness of both business and government enterprises in the city. The UK technology magazine Computer Weekly ran a series of articles on the disruption and how organizations in the area fared during the event. One such article, entitled: Businesses Must Ensure Back-up Phone Lines Take Different Routes, reported how several area businesses with backups were shocked to discover that their secondary lines ran through the same tunnel as their primary systems - so these were rendered inoperative as well. "Duplicating telephone service providers is no guarantee of protection. Most telecom service providers, including mobile phone companies, ultimately rely on BT lines," reported sources reached in the story. "Companies should ensure that their back-up centers are not only geographically distant but are linked to different telephone exchanges."

The story describes how some enterprises managed to continue operations normally during the outage.

"First Option Hotel Reservations in Stockport is one example of a company that thought ahead," wrote the story's author. "The firm has two high-capacity Internet lines linked to separate telephone exchanges and carried on doing business with little disruption when its primary link was severed in the fire."

The full article is available here: http://www.computerweekly.com/articles/article.asp?liArticleID=129723&liArticle
TypeID=1&liCategoryID=6&liChannelID=7&liFlavourID=1&sSearch=&nPage=1 .