Pop Idol knocks out BT's network

Parts of BT's phone network were knocked out for hours on Saturday night after a flood of calls to vote for Britain's Pop Idol overloaded the system.

Sections of both BT's and NTL's networks were jammed when almost nine million callers phoned in to vote for either Will or Gareth.

Although 28,000 phone lines were opened between 8.10 p.m. and 10.20 p.m. on Saturday night, they were unable to cope with demand. At the height of the voting, one million viewers were calling every second.

During the two hours the lines were open, 8.7 million viewers voted, making the Pop Idols final the UK's biggest ever phone poll.

But The Sun reported today that thousands of callers were outraged that they had been unable to connect, after frantic viewers received engaged or unobtainable tones.

BT said that it had been forced to introduce 'call gapping' to deal with the 48 million attempts to connect to the voting lines. Call gapping randomly drops some connections to the system in order to prevent overload.

But BT and NTL users reported problems on the networks hours after the voting had finished. Some mobile users even complained of problems sending text messages.

In previous episodes of the show, the maximum number of votes cast through the 28,000 phone lines was 5.8 million, a far cry from the 8.7 million who voted on Saturday.

Some viewers even suggested the outcome would have been different if more capacity was available.

In case you were doing anything more exciting on Saturday night and missed the final, Will won with 4.6 million votes to Gareth's 4.1 million.