BT Internet (BT is the old national telco - think AT&T of old but without the niceness or competence) managed to break an exchange in Edinburgh which stopped pretty much everyone in the upper half of the UK accessing the Internet by ADSL last night - they managed to cut off something like 10 million people.
Competence?
They appear not to have heard of it.
Maybe we could get DX to run the phones here - they couldn't do worse than BT do and their customer service is a lot better - and faster.
Actually the best and (usually) cheapest cellular telco here (3) is HK owned, being a part of Hutchison Whampoa. They built the Orange network here and built it out to remarkably good coverage in unexpected places, but when they wanted to build a 3G network they were forced to sell Orange to France Telecom which still sees itself as part of the French Civil Service.
Typical, isn't it? Same here, there have been times when entire provinces are cut off, and a call to customer service elicits the response, "We have no reports of outages in your area." Except when it happens around here in these parts, it isn't noteworthy enough to mention. :)
I spent three hours trying to get through to the "help" line. Which gets answered in India. Sometimes the accents are a problem though the staff are really nice and helpful. Problem is the UK end routinely lies to them.
I spent 8 weeks once trying to get internet access (and dialtone) back - that was when i found out that BT has a director whose job it is to apologise for how rubbish they are. She's a lovely lady, pity the rest of the board don't listen to her. It took legal action to get that far. My father is a retired judge and professor of law which did help. BT expected me to pay for two months of no service at all - my father was very helpful in drafting the small claims court papers. It took that to discover the BT director.
Even the automated status line fell over under the load with 10 million annoyed people trying to call it. It was 3 hours into the outage till it even acknowledged there was a problem.
This one was bad enough to actually make the national news. Not that a BT screwup is news....
They once managed to burn to the ground the data centre that connected the NHS (over a million employees - the third biggest employer in the world) to the Internet. No email for 2 weeks! It was wonderful.