Cloud Nine tears chunks out of BT

Thousands of users affected - BT branded a "public disgrace"...

ISP Cloud Nine has dismissed BT's unmetered internet product a "public disgrace" following a highly public spat with the telco. After 19 October Cloud Nine reported a significant increase in the number of connection failures when its users tried to log on to Friaco unmetered dial-up accounts. BT has blamed these problems on an incident when an earth mover in Cambridgeshire bored into part of BT Ignite's backbone network, cutting the equivalent of 11,000 2Mbps circuits and causing problem for many BT Ignite customers. The move left users of Friaco unmetered internet products from many ISPs with intermittent connection failures. Cloud Nine chief executive Emeric Miszti said that 200 of his users had been affected, and that potentially 10,000 across the country would have been hit. A possible cure for the problem appeared fixed when a Cloud Nine discovered that altering the settings on Windows 2000 and XP machines could fix the problem, but Miszti reckons that 10 per cent of his users were still having trouble. He speculated that an incomplete upgrade of BT's network was responsible for the problems, but that BT was slow to resolve his customer's problems. "It is a national disgrace," he said. "A lot of people have been affected, BT has not got to the bottom of it." He refuted BT's claim that the connection problems occurred because Cloud Nine users were exceeding their allocated capacity. A BT spokesman refused to comment on the details of the issue, but said that they were continuing to talk to their customers to resolve any ongoing problem.