• silicon.com
• Technology
• Networks

By Ben King, 2 May 2002 17:10

NEWS BT was forced to suspend new broadband connections for around five days earlier this month after faulty Fujitsu equipment caused mayhem in the nation's exchanges. Two separate generations of Fujitsu line cards have been identified as faulty, affecting both existing and new customers using self-installed or engineer-installed broadband. A BT spokeswoman said: "The faults became evident at the beginning of April when we cut prices and began to sell in volume." On 1 April BT cut the price of broadband to £14.75, prompting a massive increase in the number of subscriptions. The problem "potentially affected" around one-third of the line cards from Fujitsu, which is one of BT's two suppliers. BT would not comment on what percentage of customers it affected. Nonetheless, BT Wholesale told its customers - the ISPs who sell broadband to the public - to extend the lead times between placing an order and connecting customers by around five days, effectively suspending connections while repairs were carried out. BT Wholesale said in a statement that "a permanent fix has been successfully installed for the second-generation line card issue. A permanent fix has been established for the first-generation card issue and has been successfully tested live in exchanges. Work began Tuesday 30 April to install this fix in all affected exchanges. "This work will be completed over a two-week period (working only at night to minimise inconvenience to end users) and letters were being sent, from Tuesday 30 April onwards, to all service providers telling them of the plans and alerting them to the date on which work will be carried out on each affected exchange." The news comes shortly after Oftel announced that broadband connections in the UK had reached half a million. Silicon.com says: The problem is not new. Last year similar line card problem kept our reporter in the slow lane of the information superhighway for two months.