BT outage cuts City leased lines

A fault at BT's Megastream leased line service on Monday cut about 1,000 lines, some of which terminated in the City of London. At least one company is seeking compensation after the line it uses to connect its servers to the Internet was cut. The company, which asked not to be named, said it took BT more than 14 hours to fix the fault. Optical fibre had to be replaced at a key exchange.

A spokesman from the affected company said the delay in fixing the line had caused major problems. "The outage's cost to us will be thousands of pounds," he said, adding that he hopes to find other companies that may also have had their lines cut. The spokesman said that even at mid-afternoon on Wednesday he still had had no response from his dedicated BT account managers.

Leased lines provide high-speed, always-on connections to large businesses, and BT's Megastream service can carry high volumes of data and voice traffic over links that vary from 2Mbit/sec -- about four times the speed of standard ADSL lines -- to 155Mbit/sec.

BT was unable to comment on Wednesday.

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