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Oopsy – Openreach UK Contractor Cuts Own Fibre in Wrexham

Monday, May 30th, 2022 (3:16 pm) - Score 6,544
openreach 2017 back jacket of engineer

A serious broadband outage that began in Wrexham (Wales) yesterday afternoon, which is affecting multiple ISPs and around 6,000 premises, appears to have been caused after one of Openreach’s contractors ended up cutting through their own fibre optic cable.

The situation seems to have started at around midday on Sunday, when customers of BT, Sky Broadband and other providers began reporting a sudden loss of service. In addition, some locals also reported that their data (4G and 5G) connectivity via several mobile operators had also been impacted (i.e. it’s possible an associated backhaul link was struck, but it could also be a coincidence).

Sadly, we’re all too familiar with the challenges of accidental damage caused by third-party contractors, which often occurs when diggers or other machinery go excavating where they should not be and cause problems. However, in this case, one of Openreach’s contractors ended up damaging their own cable, which is highly unusual.

A Spokesperson for Openreach said:

“Unfortunately one of our contractors working on our behalf cut through fibre serving approximately 6000 properties in Wrexham.

Our engineers have been working hard throughout the night to replace the damaged fibre cable and jointers are currently on site to connect the new fibre joints. The first customers will start having full service restored later today and subject to any unforeseen problems we anticipate that all customers will be back on line tomorrow.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience caused by this incident and appreciate the patience shown by those customers that have been affected.”

We’d hate to be the person carrying the can for that one. Openreach doesn’t state which contractor was involved, although we can see that MJ Quinn is one of the most active contractors for them in Wrexham.

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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
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 and .
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Comments
24 Responses
  1. Avatar photo Alex A says:

    Wouldn’t be a suprise if it was MJ Quinn…

    1. Avatar photo Lexx says:

      You should see how low they are installing the fiber pots on poles (so low 16 year old’s could reach the fibre loop under the pot that’s assuming the pot is actually attached to the pole and is hanging)

  2. Avatar photo Jordanoz says:

    hahhhahhahhhhhahha. Well that’s Openreach for you.

    1. Avatar photo Broadband Engineer says:

      Its a 3rd party contractor not Openreach

  3. Avatar photo Al says:

    If you pay peanuts you get monkeys.

  4. Avatar photo David MW0DCM says:

    Will we see this when overbuilds get more and more? I’ve seen Virgin do this when they were in an area of Walsall as cable TV was just starting out… They took a chunk out of OR cabling.
    It’s definitely a fact of life now, and speaking of MJ Quinn, they’re heavily used here in the Rhondda to!

  5. Avatar photo Matt says:

    And don’t finish the build befor moving on even if your in the plans give up with these clowns

  6. Avatar photo Matt says:

    I’m so glad I didn’t take out a contract with them as they seid I Could get fttc befor then upgrade me free for fttp in like a 2 3 weeks lies its been months doged a bullet as I would be stuck in contract and still have no Fttp and slower than I got now I have 1gbps atm with virgin o2

  7. Avatar photo Michael says:

    Love stories like this.
    Kinda amusing! Not for the customers through.

  8. Avatar photo Aled says:

    How do they repair these types of incidents? Is it replacement of the whole fibre length, or can you use an optical epoxy to bond them back together?

    1. Avatar photo Rogan8 says:

      Rrplace the whole length node to node usually

    2. Avatar photo Ferrocene Cloud says:

      Cut the damaged fibre out up to fibre joints, rope new fibre in, resplice.

      Anyone claiming the entire fibre is replaced node to node has no idea what they are talking about.

      Source: I worked in telecomms for years and had to work with splicing teams.

    3. Avatar photo Ferrocene Cloud says:

      Just realised I didn’t mention what resplicing entails.

      You take two fibres, clean then, and then use a splicing machine to fuse the two ends. Done well you get very little loss.

    4. Avatar photo Scott says:

      Ferrocene I would argue it depends what type of links the fibres are used for. It could be high capacity or fibres supplying a particular client that was commissioned within a certain optical budget in which case they will replace node to node or joint to joint as they don’t want another splice.

    5. Avatar photo Ferrocene Cloud says:

      @Scott In this context, you’re not going to replace it node to node, that is generally only used for short fibre runs. If you’re replacing miles and miles of fibre, that’s a massive job. Roping a few hundred yards of the larger cables takes enough time as it is, even if the splicing is the longer part of the repair.

      A good splice will only have a minimal impact – if you’re 0.1dBm away from it being an issue, then any network worth mentioning will be firing off alarms like crazy and it would be practically unusable. And you should not really end up in a situation where a cable is going to constantly be respliced. You’d have to be looking at something like at least 3+ dBm loss to be an issue, which is one hell of a bad splice job.

      The fibres also get tested, if they’re not in spec then it’s going to get repaired. If you had some random situation where a fibre was damaged multiple times and respliced, eventually the length would be completely condemned and redone.

      I can’t think of any situation I’ve seen where that’s an issue. The one that came closest was an undersea cable constantly being damaged, and optical loss wasn’t the problem, it was the constant cost of expensive repairs, and the delay in getting the ship out there.

    6. Avatar photo Daljit says:

      You cannot use optical epoxy. The fraction of light and data transmission needs to be in full. Optical epoxy is used as a seal to contain the light at the joints of the Interface block.
      Brand new links and interface connectors need to be used.

  9. Avatar photo Phil says:

    Openreach should fired their contractor MJ Quinn. No Excuse!

    1. Avatar photo An Engineer says:

      It was probably a major error by one person, not a catalogue of errors nationwide by the contractor.

      I appreciate you may be perfect but the rest of us make mistakes. We may pay for them, rightly so, but to terminate all contracts with the company is absurd and isn’t happening.

      Shame on you for wanting all these jobs to come under threat.

    2. Avatar photo Jellybean says:

      We had an MJ Quinn engineer install a second line for a customer.

      Made a total mess of it and knocked out our customers existing line in the process.

      He marked the job as complete when he shouldn’t have done.

      Actual Openreach engineer attended and said it was a complete mess with several breaks across both of the lines, he was shocked how badly the job was executed.

      Left the customer with 2 dead lines for 24 hours.

  10. Avatar photo Iain Widdrington says:

    Hi Mark. Have you got or have you done any reviews on Weefibre?

  11. Avatar photo Cableguy says:

    Ferrocene, i, that’s a good one mate. What if there is no length on the cable ? Loads of mis understood comments here . Someone had a bad day and cut the wrong cable , very easily done. Happens day in day out, it’s only the bigggies that hit the headlines. He or she will learn from it . Sometimes i think people simply don’t understand the scale of the job, the network, the amount of interventions day in day out , must be in the hundreds of thousands , getting close to 40 odd thousand engineers just for OR now i think ? These guys are the salt of the earth and keep shit running for folk to make moronic comments on the world wide web.

    1. Avatar photo Ferrocene Cloud says:

      In context, we’re talking about a backhaul link, or other major break. This is not a 10 meter fibre patch or other short run where you’d replace the entire thing.

  12. Avatar photo Cableguy says:

    Cheers for that info Ferrocene, I had assumed that due to the amount of subs affected that it was a CJ cable. You were never actually a fibre Engineer though where you, what they call a jointer ? I feel your not experienced enough to comment on the fix, let alone to tell people they have no idea.

  13. Avatar photo Contractor says:

    Knowing MJ Quinn, the engineer who did this will be billed the entire cost of the repair, plus admin fees, plus the compensation paid to the CP’s. MJ Quinn engineers are not employed by MJ Quinn and are sub contractors to them even though they are driving a MJ Quinn liveried and Tooled van!

Comments are closed

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