Cowling Suffers 2-3 Week Broadband Outage After Car Hits Local Cabinet

Residents of a rural village in North Yorkshire (England), Cowling, have complained about the “fiasco” of Openreach’s (BT) response after some were left without broadband connectivity for around 2-3 weeks, which started when a car crashed into one of the operator’s local FTTC cabinets.

At this point we should say that the picture accompanying this article is actually from the aftermath of a similar accident that occurred in Bourne End (Buckinghamshire) last year. We don’t have a picture of the latest incident, but street cabinets often need to be completely replaced after such events.

Otherwise the latest incident in Cowling began on 29th September 2016 after a vehicle travelling near to Lane Ends on the A6068 ended up smashing into one of Openreach’s local FTTC (VDSL2) based “fibre broadband” street cabinets. Sadly the problem wasn’t completely resolved for another 2-3 weeks and some residents weren’t at all happy.

Alan McEwen, Local Business Owner, said (Keighley News):

“It’s been a nightmare. Obviously accidents do happen. However, this collision resulted in many small, local businesses, tradesmen and hill farms being without Internet.

I’ve been run ragged on the phone speaking to people from the Highlands to Belfast trying to get it sorted out. The most local person I could find to speak to was someone in Blackburn, who didn’t have a clue where Cowling was.

I consider the BT service to be appalling and not fit to operate as a service provider.”

In fairness we’ve seen similar accidents in the past and some of those have taken a lot longer than 2-3 weeks to resolve. On top of that the loss of broadband, while obviously very important, will always come secondary to any resultant police investigation and of course the potential for loss of life or serious harm during the incident itself.

Once the police work is done then the engineers can finally get to work, but such things are rarely an easy fix. Openreach can’t simply throw a new cabinet on top and they may need additional permissions or support from other groups (power companies etc.) in order to conduct the necessary repairs.

The problem may also be exasperated if the IDC connections and other cables have been damaged, both in the cabinet and going down into the ducts underneath, none of which are a quick fix.

However in this case it was noted that part of the reason for the repair taking 2-3 weeks was because, according to a staff member at BT’s retail ISP, “Openreach were awaiting delivery of a component“. This suggests that their local division might not have had enough replacement kit in-stock for this sort of eventuality.

A Spokesperson for Openreach said:

“We were first aware that there was a problem with this fibre broadband cabinet due to a road traffic accident late at night on September 30.

Our first priority was to make the cabinet safe as it has power running to it, which happened in the early hours of the next day.

Unfortunately we were faced with some technical and engineering challenges to get the cabinet fully up and running again and the service was restored on October 17.

We apologise for the delays and the inconvenience this caused to people in the local community.”

Clearly one area where situations like this could be improved is on the communication front. At present Openreach passes information about such incidents to ISPs and they in turn relay a softened version to customers, but it would be handy if Openreach also operated a central service status database that could be accessed / searched by the public.

A further bit of digging suggests that some people were actually able to get back online within 3-5 days, although it’s not clear if they were FTTC or ADSL subscribers.