F4RN Community Rural FTTH Broadband Network Damaged by Vandals

The B4RN inspired Fibre for Rural Nottinghamshire (F4RN) project, which is rolling out a 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) network to houses in rural Fiskerton and Morton, has been disrupted by £1,000 worth of damage after several of their cable ducts were cut by vandals.

At present F4RN, which encourages locals to help build the network and has raised nearly all of their required £150,000 investment by issuing Community Shares to anyone who wishes to invest in the scheme, has already made a lot of progress and they’ve so far managed to connect 110 premises.

Most recently the team have been busy laying down new fibre optic cable around Station Road in Fiskerton. Apparently the team packed up on Saturday afternoon and then returned on Sunday, but what they found the next day was most upsetting.

F4RN Statement

We are very sorry to report that last night the work we are doing on Station Road suffered what can only be described as systematic vandalism amounting to deliberate criminal damage.

Where we had buried duct but left some coiled and ready for customer connections, these have been cut. We had also stored two drums of ducting close to the works, but safely out of the way, ready to continue this morning – these appear to have been attacked with secateurs or pruning shears and it looks like we may have to write off several hundred meters of ducting.

As well as the financial cost of replacing the damaged ducting, we have wasted time today trying to recover what we can of the work we did yesterday. We are still assessing the damage and cannot rule out having to dig up some of the drives again to replace the damaged ducting.

Obviously we are treating this extremely seriously. The police have been informed and are investigating.

If you know anything about the damage or can provide any information that would help the police with their investigations then please let us know, or contact the police – anonymously if you prefer.

Thanks again to everyone for your tremendous support. Although this mindless act by one individual is extremely upsetting, we continue to press on with the project to make Ultrafast 100% fibre broadband available to every property on the parish.

We wouldn’t be at all surprised if the “vandal” had cut the ducts open in the hope of finding some valuable copper cable and, assuming this to be the case, then they will have been mightily disappointed to find lots of high capacity optical fibre staring back at them (fibre isn’t worth anything to dodgy scrap metal dealers, which is another good reason for using it). Either that or they were just a total ****! Pardon my French.

The good news is that the F4RN team will continue to press on with their roll-out, despite the impact of one rotten piece of scum on their otherwise excellent work.