Severn Trent Water experiences significant telco outages which could affect 2,000 users, every three months, reveals CIO

Telcos need to 'manage their game in the 21st century' says Myron Hrycyk

Severn Trent Water experiences significant communication outages as often as every three months, affecting 2,000 staff and all the customers they serve, its CIO Myron Hrycyk has revealed.

Speaking at Azzurri's Connect 2015 conference in London, Hrycyk said telcos which serve "always-on" utility companies such as Severn Trent need to vastly improve their service to reflect the importance of their roles.

While Hrycyk acknowledged that "everything could be fine" for six month patches as well as the more frequent disruption he has noted, he questioned telcos' general ability to understand the impact of disrupted services whenever they are undergoing infrastructural changes.

"One of the concerns I have is, do suppliers of my telecoms services really appreciate the level of service that I need, and the lack of outages I require?" asked Hrycyk.

"Something I've been looking for from my suppliers is an understanding of [the effect on us caused by] a lack of service."

Hrycyk also said he would expect a network to have a "robustness" to support occasional outages without total cut-off.

"So it's about how telcos can manage their game in the 21st century, to meet that demand," he said.

A Severn Trent contractor from the audience joined Hrycyk's voice, adding that while his firm was expected to constantly undercut the competition with its offerings to stay in the game, it was finding this a challenge when let down by the same telcos as Severn Trent.

Mark Lam, CIO at BT's Openreach, also on the discussion panel, argued that as BT's UK broadband service had inherited copper networks, branching out was still a slow process, while director of IT service management at EE, Chris Williams, described "up to 200,000 changes a month" on the service's networks.

"So the scale of change is phenomenal for us," he said.

But Hrycyk made the point that, year on year, "there are increasing expectations, and everyone now expects 24/7/365 [service]".

"When I look at the outages that are generated within the components of the companies that deliver my services - such as Azzurri - the frustration just grows. But there seems to be a lack of understanding of what all those outages can actually cause."

Asked by Openreach's Mark Lam to describe the frequency of outages, Hrycyk reported a situation where 2,000 employees could be left unable to communicate with each other or customers in outages that "seem to go through patches, which could be about one in every three months".

"As a customer, increasingly I feel we need to get out of conversations about SLAs [service-level agreements] and so on. Otherwise it's hard to have a debate about performance," he said.

"I think we need to do a lot better," conceded Lam.