Virgin Media Sorry for “inconvenience” After Street Works Encircle House

Installing new fibre optic broadband cables is an important, but often disruptive, element of street works and sometimes it creates problems. Take Virgin Media for example, whose engineers managed for a short period to all but encircle one family home in Bolton (Greater Manchester, England).

In the picture you can make out a small gap where access has been left for the car and driveway, although earlier pictures taken by the property owner (47 year old Dave Henshall) show that no such access was initially provided when the incident first occurred. Virgin’s civil engineers simply left the house surrounded on the main walk and road access until the next day.

Usually it’s Openreach (BT) that takes the flack for positioning of their FTTC Street Cabinets, but this time Virgin Media seem to be in the firing line. The cable operator is currently in the process of expanding their network (Project Lightning) to reach another 4 million premises in predominantly urban areas by 2019 (roughly 60-65% UK coverage).

According to the Manchester Evening News, Mr Henshall wrote a letter of complaint to Virgin Media’s CEO, Tom Mockridge, which said: “When I came home from work today to find my whole house barricaded off from rest of street, I was disgusted. My wife informs me the last workmen left at 2pm with no thought to the fact she could not move her car from our drive, and it is stuck now till at least 8am tomorrow.”

A Virgin Media Spokesperson said:

“Virgin Media expects the very highest standards of work from all its contractors. We apologise for the inconvenience we have caused during work to lay ultrafast broadband on this street and we will be discussing the matter with the contractors as a matter of urgency.”

Mercifully such disruption is usually short lived, although we have seen other cases around the United Kingdom where different network operators have left work in a poor state for several days or even weeks. However this is rare because operators tend to work quite quickly in order to keep costs low and so hopefully Mr Henshall’s problem has already been resolved.

On the other hand there will always be some disruption involved with deploying new infrastructure. In the battle for hearts and minds most operators will also try to minimise this as much as possible, but mistakes do still get made.