East Cork Broadband offer wireless broadband connectivity in the greater Aghada, Midleton, Dungourney and Clonmult areas. It was planned that a licenced link from CIX would start supplying bandwidth from CIX to East Cork Broadband on 18th July 2009.

Disaster struck on Monday evening at around 6:00pm on the 6th of July when connectivity from their existing bandwidth supplier ceased due to equipment failure. By coincidence, Malcolm Stead, the CEO of ECB, was standing in the network operations centre (NOC) at CIX, discussing the upcoming migration, when his phone went into meltdown from customers reporting loss of service.

A temporary route was built to his recently installed but untested radio link from CIX. Within fifteen minutes of the outage, bandwidth was again flowing to ECB.

The underlying outage lasted until just after 9:00pm at which time ECB went back to their regular supplier. On the following Saturday, the 11th July, ECB began taking their permanent feed from CIX, one week ahead of schedule.

Malcolm’s quote of the evening was “There is nothing like an outage to get the creative mind moving”.