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By editorial@silicon.com, 26 November 2001 17:15

COMMENT Last week represented a monstrous debacle for BT, even by its standards. The silicon.com virtual mailbag has been bursting at the seams with messages from irate BT customers who had lost mail, lost work and lost clients because of a colossal snafu. Now, a fibre optic network is thousands of miles long. Some idiot is bound to put a JCB through a cable or poor coffee down the back of a network switch now and then. Users can live with the occasional data outage. They may prefer not to but they don't really have a choice. What they can't live with is being kept in the dark. BT has a knack of turning one bad story into three with poorly cooked up denial. Here's what we'd like them to do: When a network goes down, proactively tell people what has happened, with a realistic estimate of when things can be put straight. Send them an email or at least put information prominently on a main web page or on hold on the phone. Ideally do this before a problem occurs (and preferably without a virus, but that's another story - http://www.silicon.com/a49440 ). When the network goes back up make sure it doesn't go straight back down again. Last Tuesday BT's backbone network was back up just after 12:00(GMT), only to fall straight over again as thousands of users all piled back in. If there is a problem, how about some compensation? BT is notoriously reluctant to give service level agreements, least of all to small fry with dial-up accounts or ADSL. How about some free minutes or months' rental? Construct and manage networks so downtime is minimised. There was a time when redundancy wasn't just something you did to your staff. Build with spare capacity, so one failure doesn't leave customers in limbo. Of course this doesn't just apply to BT. Any network service provider is bound to have issues and here we're using as an example the most important and prominent UK provider. But the good providers talk to their customers and make it up to them when things go wrong. Every failure represents a chance to do something good. We just wish BT would see it that way.