Openreach Cable Theft Knocks Out Broadband in Part of Wrexham

As many as 2,400 broadband ISP and phone customers on Openreach’s network in Wrexham (Wales) have suffered a serious loss of service after two separate thefts of copper telecoms cable (Metal Theft) struck several locations in the county, which both occurred over the past week.

Over the last couple of years we’ve reported on a growing string of similar attacks against Openreach’s infrastructure, most recently in Cambridgeshire (here, here and here), which are aimed at stealing the operator’s copper cables and are usually committed by an organised gang. The high price of copper tends to fuel such activity, and the perpetrators have no regard for the serious harm they cause to locals.

As above, it’s not uncommon to see a string of such attacks hit an area before it starts to subside – often as a result of increased public awareness, police activity and Openreach’s security enhancements. The same is now being seen in Wrexham, where some 700 metres of copper telecoms cable – impacting c.2,000 customers – was stolen by ripping it out of the ground somewhere between Southsea and Coedpoeth.

According to the Whitchurch Herald, a similar incident then occurred in Overton-on-Dee, where around 800 metres of copper was stolen, and some 400 customers ended up being disconnected.

An Openreach spokesperson said:

“We can confirm that around 700 metres of our underground copper cable has been stolen which has badly damaged the network and caused disruption to phone and broadband services to potentially around 2,000 customers in the Southsea and Coedpoeth area.

We anticipate that full service will start being restored to the first customers later this week but due to the very complex nature of the repair work, which will also need traffic lights in place so that we can carry out the work safely, the work will be completed later next week.

…

Earlier this week around 800m of copper cable was also stolen from our network serving around 400 customers in Overton-on-Dee. Work has already commenced to repair the damage and we’re hopeful of restoring full service to customers that have been affected by this theft by end of this week.”

The ongoing rollout of optical fibre services (e.g. FTTP broadband) should eventually help to reduce such thefts (fibre has no value to thieves), but it won’t completely stop the problem from occurring until much further into the future. This is because the gangs will sometimes attack fibre ducts on the assumption that they might contain copper. In other cases, copper and fibre cables may indeed share the same duct, and thus the damage caused to one cable may end up impacting fibre services too.

Sadly, copper telecoms cables remain a common target (examples here, here, here, here, here and here) for organised crime, and it seems to be getting worse.