Thousands of Wanadoo UK customers were left without broadband after the ISP's broadband service went titsup yesterday.

Punters in London and Manchester - two cities in which the France Telecom-owned ISP is rolling out its unbundled network (LLU) - reported that their connection died early yesterday morning.

One Wanadoo user told us: "They collapsed at about 9:30am yesterday and, despite various promises of being fully active by 9pm, there was no sign of the network at midnight or indeed this morning."

Wanadoo (which is busy putting the finishing touches to a major rebranding exercise as it adopts the name of sister company Orange) confirmed that it suffered "a broadband network outage yesterday", although it insists the problems have now been resolved.

"Only customers within our LLU network areas were affected and the outage was caused by a network equipment failure," it said.

"We worked with our suppliers to rectify the problem as quickly as possible and normal service has resumed. We apologise to those customers affected."

Ever since Wanadoo began migrating customers onto its LLU network, the ISP has been suffering teething problems leaving some users without broadband for several months. The matter has been made worse because a faults system is failing to work properly, creating a backlog of snags and broken connections.

The ISP told us recently: "As we have said before, LLU is a very complex technology and a number of things can go wrong, so if a very large number of customers are being migrated, a few might experience problems. The fact remains that the very vast majority of Wanadoo LLU customers have not had any issues at all." ®

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