Homes Cut-off as Thief Steals 200m of Copper Broadband Cable in Cardiff

Have you seen the man pictured? The South Wales Police are appealing for information after some 200 metres worth of copper telecoms cable was stolen from near St Fagans Road on the western side of Cardiff (Wales). The incident has unfortunately left an unspecified number of local homes and businesses without a working broadband or phone service.

The Metal Theft was first reported at around 8am on Saturday 31st January 2015 and anyone with information is being asked to call police on 101 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111 (please quote occurrence number: 1500035049).

Dan Howe, Chief Inspector, said:

“Cable thefts such as this can cause widespread disruption to businesses and householders and this incident has affected a whole community. We have released images of a man we want to speak to in connection with this incident. I am appealing to anyone who recognises the man in these pictures to come forward.”

The official South Wales Police Facebook Post includes a second picture of the suspect, whom appears to be riding a bike. But contrary to popular local belief this is not actually, we don’t think, ex-Footballer Paul Gascoigne :).

Meanwhile some locals, such as Kirsteen James, have expressed frustration because they had to hear about the reason for the extended service outage online, “No one thought to let residents know other than the Internet,” she exclaimed.

Mind you this is fairly common for all such incidents and consumer ISPs generally don’t pro-actively notify customers about local service connectivity problems (except via service status pages etc.). Indeed if your phone and broadband service is down, and you haven’t got a mobile on file for the account, then they wouldn’t be able to anyway.

At the time of writing it’s also unclear how this individual was able to extract all of the cable by himself, assuming he was working alone and unassisted by machinery.