An equipment failure- possibly at BT Oxford - caused 18 BBC Local Radio Stations to fall silent for a period during the morning of Friday 1st September.

"Radio Today" says, here, that 33 transmitters were quiet until the stations started to re-broadcast Radio fivelive. It went on to report that BT had confirmed that "the issue was caused by an engineer carrying out pre-work activities in Oxford where a fibre tray was disturbed at the time of the incident."


More about ViLoR (Virtual Local Radio) may be found, here, a BBC Media Centre announcement from 2014.

"To the presenters and production teams the studios will appear much like traditional studios but with the underlying equipment and infrastructure moved to a central, shared, location. Editorial teams will have full control over the play-out system and mixing desks, but the actual audio files will be stored, streamed, mixed and processed in a remote data centre, in real-time. Importantly, the system was designed to ensure that only the back-end equipment is centralised so that editorial and production teams can continue to present from the local community just as they do today."