BT Copper Cable Theft Causes Internet Outages in Croydon and Sutton

Thousands of homes and businesses in the London boroughs of Croydon and Sutton have had their broadband and phone services disrupted after criminals pulled 140 metres worth of BT’s valuable copper telecoms cable out of the ground last week.

The “malicious damage” occurred at 5.20pm last Wednesday and involved four large underground cables on Church Road, which were cut and then removed. Unfortunately the damage was so serious that, after almost a week of waiting, many locals are still being impacted by the lack of service (Croydon Advertiser).

Bernie Auguste, Head of Security at BTOpenreach, said:

“This malicious damage to our network has resulted in communities and businesses in the surrounding area to be without telephone and broadband services, causing disruption to thousands of people. This incident occurred at a busy time of day and we are calling on anyone who may have seen anything suspicious in and around the Church Road area to contact Crimestoppers.”

Openreach’s engineers are said to be “working around the clock” in order to fix the problem and as usual Crimestoppers (you can call the charity anonymously on 0800 555 111) are offering a reward of up to £1,000 for any information which leads to arrests and subsequent successful convictions.

BT employs a number of measures to track copper thieves, such as tagging related cable with SmartWater. Last year also saw the introduction of a new Scrap Metal Dealers Act, which has introduced new rules to tackle rogue scrap metal traders that have been helping to fuel a rise in the theft of copper broadband and phone cables (plus other metals from different industries).

Sadly the criminals have continued to ignore such measures, although life is now getting harder for them.