Original article ISPreview UK:Read More
The ability of a broadband provider to offer an effective and informative ‘Service Status‘ page, which can be useful for keeping customers updated about developments during network outages, is a crucial but often overlooked feature of modern internet provision. Yet in recent years’ ISPs seem to have been making them less and less effective or removing them entirely.
In the past it was fairly normal for any ISP worth their salt to include a Service Status page, which would often be kept regularly updated with general network incidents, planned maintenance and major outages. Such pages help to keep consumers informed and, as a result, they can also reduce the pressure on support lines (phone), which are often at risk of becoming overloaded with demand during major outages.
Some broadband providers, such as Andrews & Arnold (example) and Zen Internet (examples here and here), still maintain fairly informative and dedicated service status pages. But others seem to have either got rid of them almost entirely (e.g. Plusnet), made them harder to find and access (e.g. sticking them behind an account login – makes life tedious if you don’t have those details on the device you’re using) or reduced the level of information they provide to the point of being almost insultingly vague. Some ISPs even require you to enter a landline number to access the details, which is hard luck if you’re on a data-only connection!
In place of those we have seen some providers putting more effort into communicating their outages via social media, which does have its merits (albeit more of a complement than a replacement). In addition, not everybody uses social media and the updates given via those usually only cover major outages. Suffice to say, there remains a strong argument for a centralised way of finding related information.
On top of this we have also seen the odd peculiarity, such as with the way that a tiny number of network operators (e.g. Virgin Media) often seem to tie their website too closely to their physical network (i.e. many of Virgin’s big outages have often taken their service status page offline too, which rather defeats their purpose). But the latter is mercifully quite a rare occurrence.
In an ideal world we’d like every ISP to maintaining a Service Status page, which would include a useful summary of current network outages (inc. a history log of recent ones), expected fix times and some limited details about the cause. Sadly, Ofcom’s rules do not specifically require ISPs to communicate details of the service outages / disruption events they suffer, which we think is one area that is ripe for the regulator to improve.
However, it’s important to remember that all complex broadband and mobile networks will inevitably suffer from faults, but the harm this causes is often magnified when providers fail to keep consumers updated in a timely fashion. The information vacuum this creates often gets filled by wild speculation and causes anxiety among those who don’t know whether the fault is within their home or the remote network.
The good news is that websites like Down Detector or the ‘Disconnections‘ section in Speedtest.net’s App are slowly becoming more useful as a way of figuring out what’s going on. But their usefulness only really extends to major outages, while smaller or more localised events often won’t register or are harder to spot. In addition, they don’t cover many smaller network providers.
Admittedly, the need for a decent Service Status page probably isn’t top of everybody’s criteria when choosing a new ISP, but we’d argue that it should be – it’s already one of our top considerations when looking to switch. In our view, any ISP that cannot communicate such events in a clear, accessible and timely fashion is failing its customers and does not deserve your money.
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