Openreach’s Wireless-to-the-Cabinet Network on Coll Broken for 3 Weeks
Some 40 homes on the remote Scottish Isle of Coll, which is home to around 200 people, have been left without broadband until at least Monday because Openreach’s engineers cannot safely reach the island by boat in order to repair their niche Wireless-to-the-Cabinet (WTTC) network. Some homes have now been offline for 3 weeks.
Between 2015 and 2018 Openreach managed to bring an ‘up to’ 80Mbps capable “superfast broadband” network to a number of remote communities by deploying their somewhat niche WTTC solution. The setup is similar to the more familiar Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL2) service, except instead of running a fibre optic cable to feed the local VDSL2 street cabinet with capacity, they harness a Line of Sight (LOS) Microwave link.
According to the Press and Journal, Openreach’s wireless link to the Inner Hebridean island (said to serve about a quarter of the local properties), which comes from a radio station at Tobermory on Mull, broke down a few weeks ago. The operator’s engineers were initially able to replace two of the “damaged” radio dishes on Thursday, but for whatever reason they were not able to restore the service.
Openreach now needs to send a team of specialist engineers to go back and resolve the issue, but the sea swell has made that difficult.
A Spokesperson for Openreach said:
“Due to lack of helicopter and ferry access, and risk to private sailings due to swell, we’re currently trying to secure a private plane, but this is not available until Monday. We’re sorry for the ongoing outage and the impact on those affected.”
Sadly, the article doesn’t mention how Openreach’s infrastructure was damaged. The Isle was only recently in the news for a very different reason, after a cat hitched a 100-mile round trip with one of Openreach’s engineers to visit the island (here).
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 Linkedin.
« CityFibre UK to Begin £17m Loughborough FTTP Broadband Rollout
Latest UK ISP News
- FTTP (5538)
- BT (3518)
- Politics (2542)
- Openreach (2300)
- Business (2267)
- Building Digital UK (2247)
- FTTC (2045)
- Mobile Broadband (1978)
- Statistics (1790)
- 4G (1669)
- Virgin Media (1625)
- Ofcom Regulation (1467)
- Fibre Optic (1396)
- Wireless Internet (1392)
- FTTH (1382)
Hopefully Monday they manage get this resolved 3 weeks is not nice to be cut off for. Maybe I’m going sound incredibly stupid here but how can you land a plane but not a helicopter?
They said “lack of access”, so it may be that the option simply wasn’t available.
If I was on Col I’d get a Starlink connection, faster and more reliable!
I suspect the wages for residents on Coll may not stretch that far.
Or Openreach arrange with Starlink to provide a backup backhaul connection for if the main microwave link to the mainland fails. One Starlink conection should be able to support light internet activities and VoIP for 40 houses.
If in this day and age we can have reserve firefighters – special Police and such – why can’t they train someone on the island to go and have a look?
Or is that too radical an idea to them?
An enthusiastic amateur may damage the equipment further or electrocute themselves. The kit has mains power feeding a DC rectifier. Most of their full-time engineers aren’t allowed into the mains powered section of the FTTC cabinets: they use different keys from the cross-connection section.
Faults taking down a group of properties for a couple of weeks due to being unable to access the fault, for example because they need to access a chamber on a major highway and need local or highway authority permission weeks in advance, happen. The customers will be compensated.
@XGS Is On – we all know that the job of an Openreach engineer is not difficult so no point talking it up. If Openreach don’t trust an onsite person fair enough its their kit but lets not kid anyone with making it sound technical.
This fix won’t be done by the average Openreach engineer.
As XGS said normal engineers do not have access to any of the electronics in an FTTC cabinet.
FTTC cabinets are configured in such a way that once they are commissioned and live you should never have to touch any of the electronics when connecting new customers, disconnecting old customers and even fixing faults.
The vast majority of Openreach engineers only have access to part of the cabinet (or a completely separate cabinet) with nothing but IDC blocks where they simply push/punch/connect your line to a tie pair that connects to the FTTC hardware.
It is likely a specialised engineer who will be fixing this job. It isn’t the guy who comes to your house to fix your broadband fault.
By all means train someone on a remote island to do the odd IDC connection in a cabinet. As you say that part isn’t all that difficult. An unlikely to happen but valid suggestion.
Letting a random member of the public touch the electronics housed in the cabinet that you don’t even let the vast majority of your engineers have a key to would be idiotic, uninsurable and would certainly breach any vendor warranty. Never going to happen.
Technical capability aside, the biggest issue I can foresee is the legal and regulatory hurdles. You can’t just rock upto a cabinet and start working in the public space without the required certification , safety equipment , guarding, and public idemnity/insurance. You can’t even open the DSLAM cabinet without having a minimum of safety training and equipment, which needs all needs to be renewed.
When openreach was originally established, scenarios like this were envisaged where openreach do not have a presence in certain isolated locations. OFCOM allowed BT to utilise engineering reource from other parts of the business in these areas to maintain service. That is no longer possible and so we have small isolated communities that are difficult to reach and difficult to maintain. Openreach will ultimately have to ensure a more robust network is in place for the future. Hopefully the upgraded wireless connection will be better.
Come on who you all trying to fool, card pulling is not hard especially when maintenance kit is on site, all the other hurdles can be overcome.
The teams who do DSLAMs may think they are something special but we all know they are not as a lot of time its pure luck what time you get put in and what kit you are trained on.
Very easy to make light of the health and safety aspects but a brand the size of BT/openreach would suffer huge reputational damage the 1st time a member of the public was killed by car or a fall from height whilst working on their behalf.
@The witcher – So you do concede the job is technically not hard, just keeping up with health and safety is the challenging bit. Getting killed by a car while falling from a height is bad enough but admitting you were working for Openreach at the time that would be embarrassing 🙂
There is very little at the sharp end of telecoms these days that’s is technically challenging. The biggest problem in an organisation the sizenof openreach is the beaurocracy , processes and lack of information sharing and training.
I don’t think most chose to work in the DSLAM network, especially as most are senior near the end of their working careers
Its not hard says:- if is so easy so when you applying them -r you talking tosh this si a WTTC not an FTTC so signficantly more complicated and changelling than your standard Dslam
You have issues putting sentences together.
He may have issues putting sentences together but let me help him out – this is a microwave link.
Training someone to work on a microwave link is a lot harder than getting them certified to work with 240V!
Anyone who has done Part P (limited scope) would be fine to work on the 240V section from a regs point of view. Limited scope can be done in a week or two.