CAR CRASH – How Long to Replace a Busted BT Street Cabinet

Residents of the large Bourne End village in Buckinghamshire (England) are furious at BTOpenreach after they were left without broadband for over a week, which came after a car crashed into one of the operators local street cabinets (no. 37 on Cores End Road) and nearly obliterated it.

Firstly, we should state that the picture on this article is actually of another crash that affected customers of AAISP some months back and still hasn’t been replaced, although you can see the arguably more destructive aftermath of the Bourne End incident here. In both cases the damage is quite significant.

Understandably the crash, which happened over a week ago, has left some local residents without broadband access and curiously BT appears to have told the local rag that they were only informed about the incident yesterday, although this appears to be a comment from their consumer ISP and not the Openreach engineering wing.

Angry locals have now taken to putting up posters around the crash site, which complain about the loss of service and call for compensation. At this time it’s not known how long the problem will take to rectify, but judging by the damage it won’t be a quick fix and we’ve seen other such incidents last for several weeks.

Meanwhile a related service status update on BT’s website doesn’t appear to provide much additional information.

BT Service Status (Infinity)

Dialling codes affected: 01628

Estimated time to resolve: 12:01
Dialling codes affected: 01628

Impacting service since 29/07/2015 16:21

We’re really sorry but we’ve got a problem at the moment in the Bourne End area, which means that some of our customers will be having trouble getting online. We’re trying to fix the problem as quickly as we can.

At this point it’s important to stress that the loss of broadband, while obviously very significant, must also come secondary to any resultant police investigation and of course the potential for loss of life or serious harm during the incident itself.

Furthermore it is also not simply a matter of throwing a replacement cabinet on top. More significant construction work may be required, particularly if the incoming and outgoing cables have been damaged going down into the ducts.

Never the less this will all come as cold comfort to locals, although Openreach do have procedures for such situations. But as usual the age old problem with a lack of communication and vague service status updates continues to plague the industry. The more you keep people in the dark, the angrier they become.