Full Fibre Broadband Network in Wolverhampton Attacked by Vandals
Broadband ISP Exascale, which is building a gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to several thousand premises – mostly around Telford and Wrekin, has revealed that several core Dark Fibre cables – between Telford and Wolverhampton – were cut this week in what appears to have been a targeted attack by vandals.
The incident appears to have started just before midnight on Sunday (28th April 2024) in Wolverhampton and is understood to have affected other network operators too. By 2am on Monday, it was clear that vandals had “cut a number of fibre cables on the entry into our Wolverhampton point of presence” and third-party contractors were promptly engaged to pull in 70 metres of new cables and splice them back together.
After finding further damage during the repair work (ISPreview understands that 8 fibres ended up needing repairs), the incident was finally declared resolved just before 4pm on Monday. The strong suspicion is that this was a targeted attack by somebody who appeared to know the route.
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Thomas Bibb, CEO of Exascale, said:
“Yesterday evening Exascale had the unfortunate experience of vandalism on one of our core high capacity links into Telford from Wolverhampton. We have lost a large number of high bandwidth optical wave lengths. The Exascale team and our layer 1 provider have been working through the night to resolve. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.”
ISPreview readers will already be aware that, over the past year, there seems to have been an increase in physical attacks against UK broadband networks. Some of the most recent examples include a “targeted attack” against Ogi’s full fibre (FTTP) network in Wales that left customers disconnected (here), as well as a similar attack against Netomnia’s (YouFibre) network in Liverpool (here) and a smaller incident against Pine Media’s network in Sheffield (here). In addition, MS3 recently had some of their poles cut down by chainsaws in East Yorkshire (here).
The situation recently prompted a group of full fibre operators, led by alternative network providers Ogi and Vorboss, to call on the UK Government and Ofcom to urgently help tackle the problem (here). In response a government spokesperson (DSIT) said that the UK has “one of the toughest telecoms security regimes in the world and we continue to work closely with relevant organisations to identify risks and ensure the security and resilience of our telecoms network infrastructure.”
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.
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What did they hope to achieve? Mindless vandalism because of no law and order. The fact they seemed to know the route seems fishy; would suggest someone/group against the company???
Probably time to actually secure those chambers and other kit from being opened so easily, but don’t know what that entails….
My vote would be not to secure them, but instead add a sensor so that the police can be called to scene in the event of a chamber being opened without prior authorisation…
Have you tried calling the police recently? 🙂
Hours later and someone rings back saying “Do you still need help”, or if slightly rural (i.e. just outside a major city) then “we can’t find the address”, or is near a border, the blame that they thought the address was covered by a different police force. We’ve had all these, even when people trespassing on land like poachers etc.
This is not a rural thing, here in London the police will literally tell you they do not have the resources even when the crime was committed under several CCTVs
They don’t care about actual crime however they are busy arresting political opposition with the UK having more online post arrests than Russia in 2022 by a factor of 10x
As usual, Government incapable of commenting on anything they do without the “we’re world-beating” meme. At least this time they didn’t quote how many billions they’re spending on the issue, focussing on inputs rather than outcomes.
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Um, these are zayo cables no?
This isn’t exascales network like the article suggests. It’s a 3rd party that Exascale happens to rent from.
Isn’t it dark fibre – so fibre dedicated to Exascale – think to all intents and purposes, it’s fair to call that Exascale’s network.
Its not though is it? lots of carriers will have waves or dark pairs over that route. This isn’t a PIA or private route they’ve dug, their press release should be more transparent and not use this an opportunity to falsely claim its their network.
Then the ISP should have put better protection around the cables.
The cables don’t belong to the ISP.
Still, better protection against these vandals should have been in place.
What protection do you think would be required against an attacker determined to cut through cables?
“Targeted” in what way? Is this corporations trying to sabotage one another? Surely it’s not your average Joe trying to knock everyone’s internet offline just for the fun of it.
They need to make it that any person doing wilful damage to national infrastructure is committing a terrorist offence with life in prison being the minimum term for being found guilty. some actual real visible police, doing police type things, like investigating and arresting criminals might help too!
There seems to be a fair bit of targeting altnets like this at the moment.
It’s not hard to find out the route. Zayo used to have a map where you can see every underground and undersea cable, be it light or dark fibre, and the level of detail is amazing. And this is a publicly available service too.
These days it’s easy to locate the dark fibre network, just look for manholes that say Zayo or Geo (they became Zayo). There’s loads of them around the Wirral in plain sight.
The real question is why are these manholes not locked? The fact you can open them by purchasing a tool for a few quid from eBay is worse. It’s easy pickings for cable thieves and vandals.