Isle of Wight Homes Hit by Double Whammy Broadband ISP Outage

Homes and businesses on the Isle of Wight, the largest island in England (south coast), have been hit by two separate broadband and phone outages this week after problems with BTOpenreach’s “planned maintenance” and a separate submarine fibre optic cable break impacted multiple ISPs on the island.

The situation began on Wednesday morning when some of Openreach’s planned maintenance to several telephone exchanges on the island ended up lasting considerably longer than expected and continued to disrupt internet connectivity until the late afternoon (around 8pm).

Services in the Cowes, Newport, Ryde, Shanklin, Sandown, Ventnor, Blandford, Gillingham, Shaftesbury, Shirley, Totton, Wimborne and Woolston areas were all affected. BT later “apologised for any inconvenience caused“. TalkTalk, Sky Broadband and several other ISPs reported related problems.

Unfortunately this wasn’t to be the end of the problems. On Thursday 600 customers connected to the Newport and Freshwater telephone exchanges lost both broadband and phone connectivity after a submarine cable, which links Portsmouth (Mainland England) to Ryde on the Isle of Wight, was “damaged“.

A TalkTalk spokesperson confirmed that “some [of our] customers on the Isle of Wight may be experiencing disruption because of damage to a cable on the mainland.” It’s understood that BT’s repair work ran into the late hours of last night.