Scottish Community Goes 1 Month Without Broadband and Phone

A small community of rural homes and businesses around Drumcavel Road near Glasgow (Scotland) have been left without working fixed line broadband or phone services for one month, which occurred after a local fusebox exploded and damaged some of BTOpenreach’s underground infrastructure.

Apparently the event, which reportedly sounded like a car had exploded, occurred on a local pylon that was carrying 11,000 volts of electricity and was so powerful that some locals even reported seeing a blue flash from their electric sockets (they might need to replace the router too if that happened and there were no surge protectors on the plug).

The good news is that Scottish Power were able to fix the fault within a couple of days, but once again BT’s network access division (Openreach) has been considerably slower and the community has so far had to go four weeks without working phone lines or broadband connectivity.

The situation has caused all sorts of problems, such as preventing local shops from taking basic Debit and Credit Card orders, as well as generally disrupting local communications.

A Spokesperson for Openreach said (Kirkintilloch Herald):

“Openreach engineers are working to clear a fault in an underground cable which provides service to a small number of customers. Service has already been restored to some customers but further underground work is required.

Traffic management is needed to work safely and it’s been agreed engineers will 
return on March 3 to 
continue this work. Anyone with an outstanding issue should report this to their service provider who may also be able to arrange incoming call diverts. We’re sorry for any inconvenience.”

Unfortunately small rural communities often have to wait the longest for serious problems to be resolved and in this instance it sounds likely that the surge may have been big enough to seriously damage some of Openreach’s local metallic (copper and aluminium) telecoms cables. Events like this that affect underground infrastructure can be both difficult to track down and remedy.