UPDATE Three of Jersey’s Vital Undersea Fibre Optic Cables Cut by Ship

Reports are coming in that the English Channel Island of Jersey has suffered major telecoms and broadband disruption after a ship, which was dragging its anchor along the seabed, broken through three of the islands main undersea fibre optic cables.

The BBC reports that it could take local telecoms operator JT at least a week to repair the break(s) and in the meantime most of the local traffic will have to go the long way around via a separate cable to France (we assume they mean the INGRID cable).

All of this sounds a bit odd since there are four main cables coming into Jersey, but only two of those (the ones that run directly to Guernsey) are close-ish together and the others are some distance away.

The ship must have been dragging its anchor for a long time for this to happen on the third (UK-Channel Islands-8) of four cables. The fourth cable to France is safe due to being on the opposite side of Jersey.

Daragh McDermott, Director of Corporate Affairs for JT, said:

“We would like to sincerely apologise to our customers for any disruption to their services.

We are working as quickly as we can to get our undersea cables repaired, and normal service resumed, and will keep customers up-to-date with what is an extremely challenging emergency engineering operation at sea.

It is exceptionally unlucky and unprecedented for three submarine cables to the UK to be cut in the same day, and it proves the value of having multiple links in the network, in order to provide a back-up connection via France.

There are lots of cables running across the seabed, and we understand that it is not just JT who have been affected in this way, with other cables also having been cut.”

Locals are likely to experience connectivity and performance problems for awhile yet, which somewhat embarrassingly comes only a few days after JT boasted of having the best fixed line broadband and mobile speeds on the island (here).

UPDATE 1st December 2016

A liquefied petroleum gas tanker called King Arthur, which despite the name is registered to Italy, has been identified as the culprit. We also understand that only one of the cables is expected to be fixed within a week, while it might take until the end of December before the other two are reconnected.