Although they may have had connectivity problems, UK high-speed Internet users outnumbered their European counterparts for the first time at year's end, with 9.8 million high-speed connections, according to research firm Point Topic. British broadband for the first time was greater than France's 9.7 million high speed Internet connections, as well as Germany's 8.4 million, Point Topic said.

Research from the firm's "World Broadband Statistics: Q3 2005" showed that while the UK still lagged behind France in September, UK growth outpaced France with almost 2.8 million new broadband connections in the first nine months of 2005. France only added 2.2 million new high-speed connections during the same time period. While Point Topic indicated UK broadband business was healthy in '05, the firm said growth fell short of expectations. A slow second quarter was reportedly offset by growth in the third quarter, which saw 900,000 more UK broadband connections added. Point Topic predicted even more growth for the fourth quarter of 2005, forecasting at least 940,000 new broadband connections for the UK.

Still, the end of the year was marked by a major outage for a significant number of UK users, reportedly stemming from software glitches at telecom heavyweight BT. The resulting outage, which impacted hundreds of thousands of broadband subscribers, knocked off or prevented connectivity for customers of America Online, Virgin, Wanadoo, Zen and other providers. BT blamed the outage, which it said lasted a few hours at dinnertime, on software issues that increased congestion.

A more detailed explanation of the November 29 outage, accompanied by BT's apology for the inconvenience to other providers and their customers, later indicated that three servers crashed after a user authentication glitch. Although limited to about three hours, the various UK ISPs impacted reported large numbers of subscribers affected.

A seemingly simple mistake was also blamed for a December 1 loss of connectivity at the British Cabinet Office Web site, which was down intermittently over 48 hours. Cabinet officials blamed the problems on maintenance issues with the site's ISP, Pipex. A Cabinet spokesperson blamed network routing problems at Pipex, which reportedly declined to comment or confirm the cause of the outage.

It turned out the issues occurred after Cabinet site support was transferred from Pipex to BT successfully, but then went down as the site was moved back to Pipex, according to the government webmaster's report. The planned maintenance mishap left government officials, stung by recent poor public site accessibility ratings, grumbling about their service provider, but it was not clear whether they would seek any kind of contract claim for the outage.

The end of 2005 outages in the UK follow a string a similarly-timed connectivity losses in the UK, including a Department of Work and Pensions department crash revealed in December 2004, and a widespread Net outage caused by a major cable failure in late November 2003.

Some 40,000 computers at the UK's Department of Work and Pensions went down at the end of November 2004 after an Electronic Data Systems worker made a mistake while performing an upgrade to Windows XP. While pension payments were not impacted by the crash, more than half of the department's PCs could not access department systems because of the error. EDS subsequently reported the computers did not need the upgrade, and indicated it would increase reviews by senior engineers and managers during upgrades.

Toward the end of November 2003, the UK was hit by a significant Net outage that was later linked to failure of one of the main fiber optic cables linking the U.S. and Europe. Brits bore the brunt of the outage, which impacted primarily voice communications, but also stunted Internet traffic, BT reported at the time. European telecom officials said Internet traffic was routed around the problematic cable, which was fixed within a month, but the outage was linked to dropped email and downed sites for UK and other users.

While the UK hosts and ISPs blamed for the recent outages have vowed to investigate and address the issues that caused so many to temporarily lose their Internet access and sites, it seems Brits may have to get used to Net downtime along with the holiday season and ringing in the New Year.