An inquest is taking place after Highland homes were unable to
contact emergency services earlier this month, as a result of 100
BT telephone exchanges being put out of action, writes Antony
Savvas
BT confirms that 50,000 homes from Pentland in the Highlands to the
Orkney Isles were unable to contact the police, fire, ambulance and
coastguard crews, who in turn couldn't communicate with each other.
The breakdown, which lasted for two-and-a-half hours, is being
blamed on a "rare computer fault" at BT's main Inverness Cameron
exchange, which knocked out 100 other smaller exchanges.
Despite an emergency line being set up by the Scottish Office to
provide communications between the emergency services, they were
still reduced to using radio links to guarantee communications.
While not on the same scale as the recent breakdown in freephone
and local call numbers used nationally, this latest failure will
put a greater focus on the type of switching and routing equipment
BT has installed in its public networks.
The national failure, which lasted more than 24 hours, was also
publicly blamed on "a computer fault". BT now admits that it was
caused by a switch from a supplier which BT chose not to name. The
same supplier is believed to be involved in this latest glitch.