Streethouse Village Stuck on Flaky Battery Backup for Broadband

Residents in the West Yorkshire UK village of Streethouse have been left to suffer weeks of unstable broadband connectivity after a lorry crashed into the local transformer box, damaging its power supply. This has forced Openreach (BT) engineers to rely on battery backup at their FTTC street cabinet.

The situation sounds similar to one that occurred a few months ago in the market town of Otley, near Leeds (here), which resulted in the same problem. Unfortunately not a lot can be done until the power company resolves the underlying problem (all the usual problems with permissions, planning etc.) and Openreach won’t generally leave expensive generators lying about as they’d easily end up being nicked.

Instead engineers have allegedly been changing the cabinet batteries every 6 hours and naturally you can’t easily do that without causing some periods of service interruption, which is what locals are now complaining about.

Dan Pearson, Local Resident, said (Yorkshire Post):

“It’s incredibly frustrating because Openreach say they are busy and we are not a priority, we’re too low down in the queue.

Openreach are paying their technicians a call-out fee every six hours to change the battery in the cabinet to get the system back up and running.

The battery is supposed to be used to stop the phone’s going off should there be a brief power cut. They wait until the battery goes flat before they call out the engineers so it can be down between half-an-hour and an hour-and-a-half each time.”

Openreach has since apologised to the community and a spokesperson for the operator said that “restoring the mains power connection is absolutely a priority for us and we are working to secure the earliest possible date for it to be re-connected.” There are several cabinets in the village and we’re not sure if the whole area is affected or only part of it. The crash itself happened on 13th October and broadband was initially offline for a week after that.