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By Dominic Maher, 1 July 1999 00:00

NEWS Ten million man-hours are lost each year due to network crashes, with over 50 per cent of these accredited to faulty hardware, according to the 7th Black Box Networking Industry Survey. Although the figure has dropped dramatically from 20 million man-hours in August 1997, the amount of time taken to get networks back up and running is increasing. Based on 429 responses from IT, telecom and network staff in the UK, industry figures have put the problem of network failures down to the complexity of today's systems - with one in ten organisations still dealing with at least one crash a month. Patrick Hudgell, technical marketing director at Black Box, said the outlook was not good: "I'd be very surprised if these figures did come down." He added: "The real worry is the length of time that networks spend down. Because networks are now so complex, it takes a lot longer than anyone would like to get them up and running again." The survey found that in 10 per cent of cases, network crashes lead to a day or more being lost within a particular organisation in over quarter of instances, companies face half a day in lost time due to system crashes. With converged networks likely to become a reality in the near future, Hudgell believes this will create more skills problems within companies. "A manager will now have play the role of the MIS and the IT manager to look after both voice and data," he said. This will force the expectations even higher, he said and stated: "People are prepared for the system to go down for a couple of hours but expect voice to always work." "It's not the end of civilisation," said Martin Brampton, chief analyst at Bloor Research. "The cost of improving a network will eventually match the cost to keep it running," he said. When asked about the high failure rate Brampton said that it was probably the software, rather than the hardware, that was causing most of the problems. He added that networks are not over complex in their inception but become so over time. He advised network managers to keep things simple.