Vandals Knock-out B4RN’s 1Gbps FTTH Broadband to Leck and Ingleton

Residents of two rural villages – Leck (Lancashire) and Ingleton (North Yorkshire) – were left without access to B4RN’s 1Gbps community built Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband network on Friday afternoon (2nd June @ around 4:30pm) after vandals dug up and cut one of their core cable ducts.

The deliberate damage cut connectivity for everybody in Ingleton and a couple of properties in Leck. Unfortunately Ingleton suffered the sharpest shock because B4RN have yet to complete their route diversification work in that area, which would have given the network significantly better redundancy in the case of such an incident (most of their network has already benefited from this).

Thankfully B4RN had no trouble locating the fault and engineers then worked through the night to fix the network and splice together 384 fibres (i.e. two core cables with 192 fibres each). According to their Service Status and Facebook page, the main core to Ingleton was reconnected by 10:45pm and all customers were then back online by 4:38am on Saturday morning.

At this stage it’s unclear why vandals would target B4RN’s fibre optic cables, although it’s possible that they could have mistaken them for BT’s nearby copper cables (copper can fetch a nice price at dodgy scrap metal dealers) or perhaps the aim was to disrupt local alarms etc.

In any case B4RN’s engineering team had everybody back online in good time and once the redundancy work is complete then any future incidents should cause significantly less disruption. Sadly all networks can suffer problems like this.