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GiffGaff does own and run some of its own kit, though, which is why O2's network wasn't taken down during the unscheduled shower. In fact O2 actually owns GiffGaff -- albeit GG is run as a separate company. GiffGaff's parent even rolled up its sleeves and helped apply a temporary fix during Friday's outage, Fairman reveals. There's no shortage of MVNOs in the UK -- Tesco and Virgin Mobile are the best known -- but GiffGaff likes to make out it's special because it does things a bit differently. It says it's able to offer cheap mobile deals, for example, because it keeps its own costs down by recruiting customers to run support services in exchange for a discount. But with Friday's day-long outage, GiffGaffers might be forgiven for thinking the company also cuts corners on its network infrastructure. So does it?.

Well, yes, Fairman tells me it would have been indigo abstract watercolor mountains iphone case possible for its service to be proofed against Friday's failure -- if it had doubled up on a particularly expensive network component which it didn't, on cost-saving grounds, Discussing the component that failed, he says: "That particular part of the system is a single physical location which, when you think about redundancy there's a spectrum of redundancy that you can build in to a system, "Obviously one of the things that we could do is to double up on that particular network component but that is a very, very expensive network component -- and one would argue that the contingency that we have currently, which is failover with free calls and free data, would be a better and more cost-effective option than actually doubling up on that component 100 per cent."The 'failover' Fairman cites is the temporary fix put in place on Friday afternoon to get some services up and running, This failover actually meant GiffGaffers who were able to make calls or get online at that time were getting free calls and free data during the outage, and even the following day, because the company wasn't checking their balances before routing calls..

"The thing that actually went wrong was not the network. It was the component that holds the balance and is the thing that the network checks if the balance is there every time a call is made," adds Fairman. "That obviously had the impact of not allowing the network to route calls. So what we did was put a bypass in on the network side of things that didn't ask the billing engine about the calls."Having stuck this sticking plaster on its network, GiffGaff was able to get service back up and running by Friday afternoon -- and has since been able to fully restore its normal network order by replacing damaged kit. Fairman reckons GiffGaff could use this same bypass workaround in a future outage scenario -- indeed, he prefers the bypass route to doubling up on that "very, very expensive" bit of network kit whose failure caused all this bother in the first place.

The bypass workaround isn't perfect though, as it would inevitably result in some loss of service for GiffGaffers while the company twiddles the knobs, But Fairman reckons it would be able to get the bypass in place faster next time, "That time delay would not be anywhere near as long in future though if it was to happen again," he says, Does GiffGaff do full disaster recovery testing? Not exactly, admits Fairman, "We have contingency planning and disaster recovery testing is kind of indigo abstract watercolor mountains iphone case difficult to do, in as much as you do need to have that dual site resilience in place to test it, so if you haven't got that you can't test it," he says, "What we do do is load test and have contingency plans for components in the system."After Friday's watery debacle, Fairman stresses that the company is reviewing its network resilience and infrastructure, and is bringing forward planned infrastructure investments totalling millions of pounds, But isn't it fair to say GiffGaff has been able to offer cut-price mobile deals by making some compromises on the quality and resilience of its network kit?..

"Clearly when you're a start-up you're very, very small and you can't afford to do much of that -- as you grow and you get more customers on board, it's a sensible thing to do to build more resiliency in. So this year we already have a plan to invest in our infrastructure significantly -- it's millions and millions of pounds of IT investment and so that's already part of our plan, we've already brought forward some of that spend," he says. "And as a result of what happened on Friday we're going to be reviewing those plans again to see if there are other things that we can bring forward so as we grow and scale the business then our commitment and obligation to our customers also grows and we'll put plans in place to do with redundancy that are appropriate."What does Fairman say to GiffGaffers who aren't convinced by its after-the-fact network investment plans and have decided to leave GiffGaff because they just don't reckon it's up to snuff?.