Rural Dorset UK Village Left Without Broadband for Ten Weeks

Residents in the tiny rural Dorset community of North Bowood, near Bridport, have complained after a failure of Openreach’s local network left them without access to fast broadband connectivity for a whopping 10 long weeks, which the network access provider has struggled to repair due to unspecified safety considerations.

The reports indicate that the community, which is home to just a handful of houses, lost connectivity on Wednesday 19th July 2023, and the service is yet to return. According to Bridport News, the issue began after one of Openreach’s cables suffered unspecified damage in a different location and, in order to resolve that, they need to find a safe location to both dig up some road and place a new pole.

The issue has been exacerbated by the fact that, according to a couple of local residents, the area suffers from poor mobile connectivity (e.g. one local claimed they could only get a single bar of 3G in their garden). However, we suspect this may vary a lot between operators as all of Three UK, Vodafone, EE and O2 claim to have good 4G coverage of the community, although their coverage maps are often about as reliable as a chocolate teapot.

Sadly, the time it takes to replace a pole and fix related wiring can vary a lot, depending upon wider issues such as the need to seek road permits/permissions, whether ISPs have classified any local customers as “vulnerable” (faster response), safety of the site, availability of engineering resources and the level of local damage etc. But ten weeks is still an absurdly long time to be left disconnected and Openreach does acknowledge this.

A Spokesperson for Openreach said:

“We’re really sorry for the delay here. We need to put a new pole in place, and it’s taken far longer than we could have imagined. This is mainly down to finding a safe site for the pole.

We understand how frustrating it is for people to be without an internet connection, and this is a priority for us. We’re doing everything we can to get this done as soon as possible.

Around six premises are without service, after a cable was damaged. We carried out a survey of the site and, to keep our engineers safe during the repair, a road closure will be required.”

Openreach’s network includes over 4 million poles across the UK, some of which are as much as 15 metres high (c.9m is more common). The operator has previously informed us that, during major storm related issues (it’s unclear if this incident was caused by a storm), it can take around 20 days to fix damaged poles.

However, over the years we’ve seen examples where, in rare cases of extreme damage, rural areas have been left to wait for 6-12 weeks for repairs to complete (here, here and here). But in urban areas a downed pole may only be a matter of hours, or just a few short days, although even these are dependent upon some of the aforementioned caveats.