Squirrel with High Fibre Diet Disrupts Netomnia’s Broadband in Manchester
Apparently the odd squirrel in Manchester (England) has developed a taste for Netomnia’s optical fibre network after one of them went nuts while taking a mega-bite out of the network operator’s overhead broadband cable in the city, which caused a brief case of nut-working failure for at least one or two of their customers.
Over the years we’ve reported on lots of animal and insect related damage occurring on the UK’s many fixed broadband and mobile networks. From swarms of bees or wasps occupying cabinets (here), to badgers blocking access to cable ducts, spiders decorating the inside of connection boxes with dense webs (here), and rodents (rats and dormice) frequently chewing through vital fibre optic and copper cables (here and here).
Suffice to say that being a telecoms engineer today requires a degree of personal fortitude in more ways than one, not least because you never quite know what sort of wildlife is going to pop out at you from the local network infrastructure from one day to the next. In this case the guilty squirrel is understood to have left the scene before engineers arrived to investigate, but thankfully the connection has since been restored.
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“The issue was reported at 3pm, and by 1pm the following day the damaged fibre had been replaced, tested, and fully restored (no squirrels were harmed in the process). It’s a small but memorable example of what sits behind network resilience. Faults aren’t always predictable, but clear escalation, experienced teams, and effective coordination make all the difference,” said a spokesperson for Netomnia.
Squirrels don’t actually have any interest in eating the cables themselves, but their teeth do grow continuously (up to 8 inches a year) and that often forces them to gnaw on hard objects (and apparently also optical fibre cables) as a means of wearing them down. In that sense we can say that this squirrel may not in fact have a high fibre diet for telecoms, but clearly they heard the internet had great branch offices. Sorry, I’ll stop with the puns now.
Despite this, it’s uncommon to see damage being caused by squirrels, with rats being by far the most disruptive vermin to modern telecoms infrastructure.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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It was a sabotage operation from Squirrel Internet!
If only we could aware comments here!
squirrels numbers seems to be increasing, I have seen a fair few where I live, I did not think they would chew fibre.
I guess they like to maintain their gut health, plenty of fibre for them.
Maybe it was a Russian agent squirrel, if we see any meerkats going near fibre infrastructure we’ll know what’s going on!
Great news this Monday
Imagine if it was buried underground in ducting instead!
Maybe we should send fibre hungry squirrels rampant on this lazy built infrastructure.
Rats tend to attack the underground stuff and they’re the biggest challenge on this front.
Peculiar scenes in South Bristol this morning. Moderate police presence and 20+ open reach engineers repairing an apparent vandalism episode. It seems (to my eyes anyway and a brief chat with a bystander) that someone had deliberately cut a whole street of fttp on North street South Bristol (fancy artsy shopping area). Closed a bank and all
Bedminster – Yes I was there and it is indeed odd
Maybe a 5G conspiracist. They sadly exist.
We take reports of squirrel-related disruption to other providers’ networks extremely seriously. An internal investigation has been launched, and the offending squirrel has been suspended pending retraining and a strict nut-based diet. ️
At least the UK does not have skunks (apart from a few in zoos).
Skunks spray a very smelly liquid with volume and range when disturbed; risk of temporary blindness and worse if it hits eyes, and practically need to bag and dispose of all clothing and other fabrics (tool bags/belts, vehicle seats if particularly unlucky), much showering and shampooing to get rid of small from body, and washing tools, boxes and vehicles.