Wiltshire UK Council Accidentally Cuts Local Broadband Cables UPDATE
The Wiltshire Council (WC) in England has apologised to residents of around 100 homes in the rural villages of Ablington and Figheldean after their contractors accidentally cut one of Openreach’s (BT) core broadband and phone cables, which has left locals disconnected for much of the past week.
Most of today’s modern communication services, both fixed line and mobile based, are supported by high-capacity core fibre optic or copper cables. Many such cables tend to be run underground (trenches, sewers etc.) and, from time to time, some of them will be broken. One of the most common causes of such damage is a mistake by a third-party contractor, such as on a building site.
In most cases the break is easy enough to fix, taking only a few short hours, although more significant and complex incidents (e.g. cables exposed during a large landslide) could take days or possibly even weeks to fully resolve.
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In this case, the WC’s contractors, which were working to improve drainage channels in the area (i.e. excavation allowing water to drain off the A345), managed to slice through one of Openreach’s core cables in the process (15th Feb). Sadly, this occurred at around the same time as a series of major storms were striking the country, which added further delays to the repairs due to issues of safety.
Cllr Dr Mark McClelland said (Salisbury Journal):
“While working on recutting drainage channels in this area in the past week, we can confirm that a cable was cut by contractors working on behalf of Wiltshire Council.
Having investigated, it seems that the cable was less than 150mm beneath the surface of the highway verge, which was not as deep as it should have been and may have caused the issue.
We would like to apologise to residents for any issues caused by this outage, but our contractors cannot restore the broadband supply; this is a matter for Openreach.”
On the point about the cable being less than 150mm beneath the surface of the highway verge, this would be correct for pavements (we’re not sure about grass verges). Openreach’s own illustration of how deep different ducts usually go states that TV/comms networks tend to be around 250-350mm, but it should be said that cables laid a long time ago might not have followed the same guidance. Likewise, shifting ground and soil in soft verges can impact cable depth over time.
We should point out that several UK ISPs – including BT, EE, Hyperoptic, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, Utility Warehouse, Virgin Media, Vodafone and Zen Internet – are also members of Ofcom‘s Automatic Compensation scheme (full summary), which will compensate consumers by £8 per day for delayed repairs following a loss of broadband (assuming it isn’t fixed within 2 working days). Customers should ensure their ISPs are aware of any outages, particularly if their provider supports this system.
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Openreach has pledged to “do everything we can to restore services as quickly as possible,” although work on this only resumed yesterday after the last of the big storms had passed.
UPDATE 2:19pm
Openreach reports that all homes are now back online.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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I do believe that the rules regarding buried cables in grass verges has to take into account if there is an undefined verge ie no kerb stones then cables have to go deeper allowing for vehicles running off the road and onto the verge.
Having investigated, it seems that the cable was less than 150mm beneath the surface of the highway verge, which was not as deep as it should have been and may have caused the issue.
Luxury, the cable feeding my property is on the surface in some areas and mostly 75mm deep. Luckily I know where it is and can avoid it, it was laid in the 90’s using ‘special’ equipment.
you can use the water supply pipe now, fibre deployed into the pipe with fittings from a company called CRALEY group craley.com
installation is faster and no trenching required so no disruption or issues with hitting other utilities or trenching up nice driveways etc etc
@tom
Fibre inside the water pipe? Brings a new meaning to ‘streaming’ haha 😀
yeah, the fibre is just blown down a approved messenger pipe that is in the water but the fibre is not in contact with the water.
The water supply comes from the opposite direction and is my responsibility, I fixed the 4″ cement/asbestos leaky pipes by feeding blue 25mm pipe down the center over the full 500M length by digging holes every 90M and breaking the cement pipe for each 100M length of blue pipe. OR have promised the fibre replacement will be at least 0.5m deep so should be a lot less hassle.
Hi John, not sure what you are saying. i just read and looked at the website, they have special fitting for pipes even 25mm, that they can install the inner pipe all the way to the property and then break out and go into the property. the fibre does need to get to the pipe first but then they just use the supply pipe to the property
The OR line comes from the opposite direction to the water pipe, they could not be farther apart in direction ie 180 degrees. That plus the water once it gets near the house gets split up into branches of lead pipe for different buildings so there is no clear exit point except back in a field where the blue pipe terminates. Anyway OR’s problem and their survey says DIG and single pole on boundary, changing it would delay it further.
@Tom
You fancy paying for any of that publicity you’re attempting to get?
For reference, if detail is important, there is no such thing as Wiltshire County Council any more, it is a unitary authority and called Wiltshire Council as referenced in the article from the Councillor. If the basics are incorrect it can somehow undermine everything else.
Indeed. Wiltshire County Council hasn’t existed since 2009.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiltshire_County_Council
Saying a service was just 150mm of cover as the reason is a poor lazy excuse. They should have had stat drawings and marked up site, Openreach even offer a free site mark-up. After breaking the surface, not to a depth of 150mm btw, hand dig near services until found should have been done. Published depths of cover are only guides where possible. Openreach may have had to lay shallow due to surrounding services. Also I very much doubt that a main telecom cable would not have been ducted. So the blame imo lays squarely with Wiltshire Council’s poor quality digging practices and disregard for other utilities.
This was adjacent to the main trunk route up the A345 where the fibre is routed directly to the centre of the village for the FTTC connection. The trunk route is under the carriageway which feeds north to Netheravon which wasn’t affected. The verges, as correctly surmised by some, are quite soft and subject to heavy and intrusive traffic and often are heavily impacted by agricultural, military and HGV traffic. We do on occasion see cables appear in the verges as they are eroded away with inevitable consequences. I suspect the cable was laid at an appropriate depth at the time but evidently not sufficient for the future.