Telewest customers posting on our forums are discussing the company's explanation of a massive New Year's Eve.

The outage, which was caused by flooding at the cableco's super head-end at Knowsley, disrupted digital cable TV and Internet services throughout the Telewest network.

'niteflite01' posted:

"To be honest that explanation from TW / BY is good enough for me.

"That's all I wanted - a full and frank account of the evening's events and an apology (well - with circumstances like those even that is an added bonus I suppose.)

"As for having a complete back-up system - we'd end up paying for that and paying greatly I suspect.

"Fair play to BY / TW :)"

'TheCremlin' said:

"I agree. Some support for TW!

"Although we detest the TV software and will be writing our complaints to them in due course. In general we can't fault Telewest.

"We have had TV off them for nearly a decade and in all that time we have only (knowingly) lost TV twice the first was over 4 years ago for a couple of hours and the other was Wednesday.

"We have never had a problem with broadband. OK We've got some email troubles that the people are looking into but it is nothing to moan about.

"I didn't think I would ever have a good thing to say about TW ;)"

However, 'smeep' pointed out that the company could learn lessons from the incident:

"Interestingly, reading their 'apology', it appears they DO have 'duplicate system' backup - Knowsley for normal service, Hayes for backup. Two comments on that: (a) they obviously have NOT well thought out how to switch from one to the other, and (b) a scenario such as I outlined, 4 facilities each capable of handling 1/3 of the traffic, would give them better disaster recovery, cheaper, than what they are doing.

"Now as a professional networker, I have a predisposition towards cable. It is ridiculous to waste aerial-broadcast (i.e. satellite) bandwidth for communciations between fixed-point stations (studio and my telly). Use hard-wire for that, aerial for mobile. But there ARE principles which should be followed, for wired comms. TW don't seem to have mastered them."

Join in the discussion taking place right now on our Telewest Broadband forum.