Car Crash in Cwmfelin Knocks Out FTTC Broadband for Nearly One Week

Residents of Cwmfelin, a village on the southern outskirts of Maesteg (Wales, UK), have been left without access to Openreach’s FTTC (VDSL) based “fibre broadband” network for almost a week after a car clipped the curb and ploughed into the operator’s cabinet before ending up on its roof.

Telecoms and broadband infrastructure can face many hazards, often from unpredictable elements like the weather but also from thieves and vehicle accidents. Unsurprisingly most such infrastructure tends to be built on streets and so every once in awhile a cabinet will meet its end on the bumper of a vehicle accident (examples here, here and here).

Sadly this is precisely what happened at 4pm on New Year’s Eve when a car struck one of Openreach’s cabinets opposite the Cross Inn on Maesteg Road in Cwmfelin (pictured above in better times). Suffice to say that residents have been far from pleased at the service outage that followed, with one local (Mr Luke) telling Wales Online that “it was a catastrophic failure and I don’t think they have put enough effort in myself into repairing it and into informing us.”

A Spokesperson for Openreach said:

“One of our engineers attended the damaged roadside cabinet on Maesteg Road in Cwmfelin on New Year’s Day to investigate and ensure the site was made safe following a road traffic accident.

Due to the location of the cabinet we had to arrange for traffic lights to be in place in order to carry out the repair works safely. These lights are in place today (Thursday) which has enabled our engineers to start work on replacing the shell of the damaged cabinet and joint the damaged cables.

Barring any unforeseen problems we anticipate completing this work and restoring full service to those residents that have been affected by the end of the week.”

In fairness if Openreach can get the area back online within a week then that would actually be pretty good for such a situation. We’ve seen similar incidents result in much longer outages (several weeks) and sometimes even after the cabinet has been replaced then the local FTTC broadband provision may remain disrupted until the power supply has been restored (i.e. due to dependence upon a flaky battery backup).

As usual the time that it takes to repair such damage isn’t merely decided by Openreach. Police need time to investigate the crime scene and if the work is likely to disrupt local traffic then the appropriate permissions have to be sought. As above, the power supply side is handled by a separate supplier and so any delays there can also impact the completion of repairs.

The problem may then 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. In this case it sounds as if the damage was much less significant than we’ve seen before and that may help to explain why the service looks set to be restored so quickly (assuming the main power supply will also be reconnected this week).

We should point out that the car crash itself, rather amazingly, resulted in no injuries.