BBC One Breakdown

That would be an arrogant abuse of the FoI act for something not in the public interest at all.

I tend to agree. It's not as if it was a signal failure at Clapham Junction, or the air traffic control system at Heathrow failing

I get what you’re saying but to argue the other side this could allow the people within the BBC to view the whole timeline of events and look into it deeper.

I'm sure the BBC will brief all the appropriate staff on the post mortem, it doesn't need an external FoI request for that to happen.

It was hardly a national disaster, or even a public inconvenience

Oh I'm sure the BBC will have a chat with RED BEE to debrief the events, an FOI would be a step too far which most people either found an inconvenience or car-crash telly but couldn't stop watching (and the average Joe would forget)

At my work, if things go wrong on-air, there is a transmission report written and sent to the broadcaster, and the appropriate departments can discuss what went wrong.

Honestly I agree. To be honest it probably wasn't needed in the thing I linked too (the radio networks getting NICAM dropouts and reverting to RBS is hardly important either)

But the Siemens incident report for that states



You could possibly argue that incident and the conclusions from it were taken more seriously because of the FoI request.

The BBCs radio network is an important piece of national infrastructure, it's supposed to be resilient because it would be used in a national emergency. That's why a massive failure caused IIRC because there was a single point of failure is significant. Plus of course having almost the entire distribution of 5 radio networks depreciated isn't great for the listener

Forcing the whole thing into a DR scenario amd part of that not working is a pretty big event.

I do remember that afternoon, we were on a trip to the coast listening to Radio 2.There were glitches that I put down to the car radio's RDS getting confused by lift conditions (it was a hot sunny day, (which of course was the trigger event))
It wasn't until we parked up at our destination, and I had a proper fiddle with the radio I noticed the RDS IDs were indicating RBS mode.

The effects were probably unnoticable by most in London and the SE, it was further north (and everyone north of the Midlands losing Radio 1 because of a separate problem at Sutton Coldfield) that the punters were affected.

The report makes interesting reading, it reminds me of many air accident reports where there are multiple events, none of which on their own being catastrophic, but when combined.....

Out of interest, where on the coast were you? My understanding is that it affected the Midlands all points north and west of there, plus of course the Oxford tx (an RBR of Sutton Coldfield).
The south coast should have been error free. I'm not sure if the problem affected the West, South West and Wales?

Well, that's the thing, started off on Oxford, then a bit of Wrotham/Guildford, then Rowridge (we had gone to Selsey).

Rowridge was definitely on RBS, because the RDS ID had the decimal point. So, and it's not clear from the account, that Rowridge must have had its NICAM feed cut too as part of the measures. The report mentions that neither Wrotham or Rowridge were affected by the drop outs (which makes sense, because the affected equipment was 'north of London', but it seems they must have cut ALL NICAM feeds (except perhaps the feed to Wrotham ?)

This is where I used my jailbroken fire stick to watch the rest of the breakdown, and then I kept Panorama on because I'm American and was kind of interested in the programme. I was then going to watch Eastenders (I had been waiting to see if anything else happened, but the only thing I got was a bit of lag about 5-10 minutes before the end), but then decided not to because I was doing homework.

I think from what I read that they force it into RBS by taking the NICAM coders out of circuit.

Oxford is an interesting case, it has a second RBS source (Wrotham?) which it can switch to when Sutton Coldfield needs to go into RBS, so Oxford becomes the source for SC rather than its relay.

Maybe that complicated setup is part of why Radio 1 failed to switch over properly at SC?