Broadband phone lines damaged by Openreach contractors

Following the damaging of underground BT telecom cables over the weekend by contractors employed by BT Openreach thousands of East London broadband users suffered an internet blackout.

The notification came that serious damage was caused to a service tunnel by a third-party contractor, which was said to be located near the Blackwell Tunnel, by BT Openreach, the division of BT that oversees network communications throughout the UK.

It was claimed that such damages could have spread over a much larger area, however, it was asserted by Openreach that the damage had affected thousands of East London users.

A spokesperson for BT said that service had been resumed to about 70 percent of its users, although an exact timeframe for when the remaining users would be back up and running could not be given by the company.

The resuming of broadband services for the customers affected by the outage could possibly take several days according to further reports by BT.

In a similar status update along the same lines BT quoted “Due to the nature of the damage, which happened 32 metres below street level, and the restricted access to the site, it is not possible at this stage to provide an exact time frame as to when service will be restored to all customers”.

Although the firm made “no promises” it did advise that work on repairs had progressed by it expected to have the issue fixed shortly.

An industry expert said “Maybe it would be a good idea to have routers that come with built in technology that switch to a wireless network that allow users to avoid being cut off completely during a significant disruption. That is the least that fixed-line ISPs can offer to business clients for example. Broadband dongles start from only £20 and could be deployed on a PAYG basis to customers.”