Two Thirds of UK People Have Experienced ISP Downtime

London, United Kingdom, June 09, 2010 --(PR.com)-- The results from 344 respondents to ISPreview.co.uk's latest survey have found that 64.7% of people in the UK experienced anything from one to five or more periods of Internet Service Provider (ISP) downtime (outages) during the past year. Some 20.9% of the 64.7% total claimed to have had 5 or more periods without any service at all.

ISP downtime results in broadband customers being unable to establish an internet connection and can be caused by any number of things, most of which will be outside of an end-users control. Power cuts, thunderstorms producing electrical interference, radius server faults (authentication/login) and general hardware or software problems are most frequently to blame.

The length of time that such outages last can also be highly variable, with around 17.5% experiencing only a brief loss of service lasting for up to 30 minutes. Others claim to have experienced outages lasting for 1-5 hours (16.5%), 24 hours+ (10.7%), 30-60 minutes (10.4%), 5-12 hours (5.5%) and 12-24 hours (4%).

"We should not be too concerned about these findings," commented ISPreview.co.uk's Editor and Founder, Mark Jackson. "Connection problems and downtime are a way of life on such a technically complicated platform. Almost everybody shall experience the odd outage, usually lasting for no more than a few minutes or hours. Happily the new generation of fibre optic broadband services are expected to be a lot more resilient."

"Sadly one in ten people still experience a service outage that lasts for longer than 24 hours, which is a serious concern. If the fault is with the ISP then they should be prepared to compensate customers for failing to deliver the service. In extreme cases an ISP should ideally offer a penalty-free escape from their current contract. Sadly most do not," concluded Jackson.

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