2 Months Long BT Internet and Phone Outage Continues in Fife Village
Brief Internet and phone outages can be annoying but spare a thought for ten homes in a rural Fife (Scotland) village, near St Michaels Inn, where a BT cable fault has left locals without a working broadband and phone service since 22nd November last year.
It’s understood that BTOpenreach’s engineers have attempted to fix the fault on numerous occasions and failed, often discovering new issues along the way. But worst of all they still have no firm idea when the situation might finally be resolved.
A BT Spokeswoman said:
“Another 350 metres of cable needs to be replaced but, given the scale of the issues uncovered to date, they have taken the decision to replace the entire remaining 800 metres of cable on the route. This is to ensure these type of problems do not arise again in the future. Planners are now working on the plans and logistics required to allow this work to go ahead.
They are aware of the lengthy delays in this case and we’ll do all we can to restore full services to those affected as quickly as possible. We would again like to apologise to everyone affected by this break in service and reiterate that service providers can help by putting line diverts in place — for example, to mobile phones — to minimise the inconvenience.”
It’s well known that rural areas are often left at the bottom of the pile when it comes to upgrading and fixing major telecoms networks, although more than two months without any fixed line connectivity would surely test the patience of even the sanest individual. The word “inconvenience” really doesn’t do it justice. [Insert remark about replacing copper with fibre optic cable, thus inciting comment war no.20498235].
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 Twitter, Google+, Facebook and Linkedin.
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Its quite simple, BT obviously dont make much of a profit off of them, so are hoping that by making them wait,the villagers will give up and go wireless.
There was an outage in Highnam Gloucestershire that took out around 300 homes just before Christmas when water got into a paper insulated (read – very old!) cable due to the weather down here. Unfortunately, due to the ongoing rain BT was unable to pump out the manhole to get safe access to the cable and it took them three weeks to sort it out. In the meantime all basic telephony and adsl broadband services were out of action. FTTC remained intact – so clearly shorts on the cable near to the exchange do not affect it much – and, needless to say, our wireless service continued unaffected. 🙂
The FTTC signal is injected and filtered out at the FTTC cab so a problem on the copper pair between the cab and the exchange *shouldn’t* affect the broadband.
Wouldn’t affect the broadband just the telephony. However much earth battery or loop.