Openreach reconnect village after water leak caused month long broadband outage
Homes and businesses in the rural Surrey (England) village of Frensham, which is said to be home to a local population of almost 1,700, have finally been reconnected by Openreach to broadband and phone services. The situation occured after they were hit by almost a month long network outage due to a “burst water pipe“.
The problem appears to have started all the way back on Saturday 5th September 2026, after a burst water pipe damaged one of Openreach’s underground cables. ISPreview understands that the issue was then compounded by a delay due to resourcing, as well as a smaller hold up stemming from the usual need to await approval for traffic management measures.
In the end the situation was finally resolved on Wednesday evening (30th September 2026), at which point part of the community had been left without access for almost a month.
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An Openreach spokesperson told ISPreview:
“We’re sorry that people in Frensham have been affected by this loss of service.
The problem was caused by a burst water pipe that damaged one of our underground cables. Our engineers have been on site carrying out repairs, with traffic management in place so they can work safely … we apologise for the disruption this incident has caused.”
A related report on the BBC News highlighted some of the comments from residents, including some vulnerable customers with telecare devices that had stopped working during the outage. Some of the locals also complained about a lack of communication, while one other mentioned that Openreach had previously promised the service would be restored multiple times and yet wasn’t, until now.
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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With Anglian Water, you would expect a much longer wait 🙂
So it is Anglian Water to blame for OpenReach not fixing their cable for a month?
Yet again Openreach taking the blame for other suppliers’ failings.
Do you understand what you’re reading, Ed?
Why do you say that? If the cable was properly sealed and the joint secured then how would a burst pipe affect it? Come on Mr Ed, are you a senior manager with no physical experience of working on a network?
A whole month to fix that is inexcusable. Trying to palm-off customers and the wider public with the excuses about traffic management is frankly insulting from Openreach. What a shambles!
You obviously don’t work in the business then. The need for traffic management permits and road closures can add weeks or months to a job and it’s totally out of the network providers hands and sits with the local authorities.
The comms repairs have to wait until the water board have completed their repairs, you are not allowed to both work in the same vicinity as the insurance for the site and the permit granted to the team repairing the water mains doesn’t cover the telecoms teams.
@Tony, The waterboard finished their repairs on the 5th september, Openreach didnt turnup to go into the road untill the 30th of September, so unsure where you are coming from, as the waterboard had left the area for 25days.
As one of the people affected by this outage, Openreach have been poor from the start, and currently some have broadband but no phone, some still have no broadband, I have both but someone else’s phone number now! how can Openreach put a new cable into the exchange but leave before connecting it fully or testing it?
Openreach filled out the paperwork to do the road management, the paper work got lost!! and had to be re-applied for, but when they turned up they had not organised all the crews on the same day, so who do you blame for that?
£10 compensation a day does not touch what we have lost so far.