Broadband services to hundreds of premises on Westray, which is one of the Orkney Islands in Scotland and is home to a population of around 600 people, have been disrupted after one of BT’s subsea fibre optic cables was damaged. Phone and mobile services are continuing to function (this traffic can be routed via other methods).
At this stage it’s not known what caused the damage, although cable breaks are not uncommon on subsea routes. Most cable breaks occur due to accidents by deep sea fishing trawlers, as well as ships dragging their anchor over them or marine life deciding to take a nibble (smaller cables have been broken by hungry sharks in the past, but modern cables tend to be resistant).
A whole industry exists to repair such cables, although the catch is that it often takes a few weeks to fix such damage – depending upon the type of break, sea depth, weather conditions and various other factors (e.g. availability of a suitable cable repair ship).
A Spokesperson for Openreach said (The Orcadian):
“We’re sorry about the disruption to service and advise residents and businesses to speak to their broadband provider for practical advice.
Our emergency response team is on its way and, weather permitting, will arrive later today to provide islanders with emergency access to the internet from a central location.”
The description given in the article suggests that the break occurred some 8km off the “mainland“, although as this comes from a local newspaper then that’s probably a reference to Orkney’s mainland rather than Scotland. The only subsea fibre that we know of going to Westray itself runs between Orkney’s mainland (near Evie) and the beach near Midbea on Westray (this was installed in 2014 by BT) – we’ve attempted to draw this (roughly) on the map.
Given the depth on that route, we’d think the most likely cause to be fishing trawlers or ship anchors.
UPDATE 29th Dec 2020
The cable has now been repaired.
It’d be interesting to know how many of the islands are the country have people living there and how many have these fibre optic links.
There are only 19 BT Subsea Fibre cables in this scheme.
https://cdn.prgloo.com/media/download/10c68699c6a64032831e8c9aff1555f5
Orkney, Shetlands are off SHEFA-2. Point to Point Microwave exists between islands where possible but it does not cover many of the 94 inhabited Islands. Inevitably Satellite Broadband will play its part.
It is a timely reminder the importance of resilience and our dependency on single points of failure. These cables haven’t been down that long.
You would think they’d rely on mircowave links apposed to a sub sea cable. Maybe down to costs?
Fibre Cables are generally more reliable and have better bandwidth than microwave.
Microwave also needs alignment and uses a fair amount of energy.
All of it used to be microwave but has been upgraded over the years as demands for better performance grew.
I’m surprised there isn’t a microwave backup TBH.
Microwave is less reliable and has a finite throughput. It tends to be used as network of almost last resort (satellite is last resort). If there’s any way at all of affordably installing fibre, install fibre.
The north isles of Orkney do indeed use microwave links for their phone and ADSL services. I suspect the total bandwidth on these is limited though, hence Openreach building links between the Mainland (which, yes, means the Orkney mainland!) and some of the isles to deliver FTTC (and presumably, at some point, FTTP).
The electricity network to the north isles runs in a ring basically, with connections to the mainland at either end – perhaps eventually the subsea Openreach cables will look similar and might offer some redundancy.