Full Fibre ISP County Broadband Attracts Complaints in Aldham

Alternative network provider County Broadband, which is currently deploying a 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) service across rural parts of England, has apologised to residents in the Aldham and Eight Ash Green areas of Essex after they complained of long and regular service outages.

The provider, which is currently being fuelled by an investment of £46 million from Aviva Investors, is presently deploying their gigabit-capable broadband network across rural communities in Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire.

According to the Daily Gazette, some locals in the two areas have been complaining about problems with service outages for the past couple of months, although the ISP itself blames the most recent spate of problems on a fallen tree that damaged their cables (we assume overhead fibre via telegraph poles).

A County Broadband spokesman said:

“We provide thousands of homes and businesses across East Anglia with full fibre broadband and the recent network issues affecting some customers in Aldham and Eight Ash Green were quickly resolved and all services have been restored.

We would like to apologise to our customers and thank them for their patience whilst our engineers carried out urgent repair work.

A fallen tree damaged cables on August 7. This was fully repaired by midday by August 9. Planned engineering work was carried out and completed by August 13.

We proactively kept our customers updated during both incidents.

We know any loss of our Hyperfast broadband is frustrating and we will continue to put measures in place to prevent future network issues.”

In fairness, it’s not uncommon for significant network damage to take a few days or more to fix, particularly when it occurs in rural areas (e.g. Openreach have had quite a few gripes levelled at them over the years for such issues).