Big Nottinghamshire Broadband Outage After Openreach Network Damaged UPDATE

Some 10,000 premises in Nottinghamshire (England) have suffered a disruption to their broadband and phone services after Openreach’s (BT) network was “maliciously damaged” by criminals. The details are currently unclear, although the fact that the operator has to replace around 700 metres of cable suggests copper theft may be the cause.

The incident is believed to have begun on Sunday night near to Trent Bridge (many people only began to notice it this morning), although most of the impacted properties can be found around the West Bridgford and The Meadows areas.

Openreach are currently anticipating that it could take up to 48 hours before everybody is back online, although most services should be restored much sooner than that. The Nottinghamshire Police have been notified and are investigating, while some local health (NHS / GP) services have had to activate their recovering plans after their IP-based phone services went offline.

A spokesperson for Openreach said (The Business Desk):

“Our network has been maliciously damaged in Nottinghamshire, and our engineers are working to replace around 700 metres of cable. They’re working as quickly and safely as they can, but we expect it could take around 48 hours before everyone affected has phone and broadband services fully restored.

We’re really disappointed that people living and working here are bearing the brunt of criminal behaviour and theft from our network. These attacks cause significant damage and unacceptable disruption to the lives of local people and put vulnerable people at risk.

We urge people to call 101 to report any suspicious activity around our network to the Police; if members of the public do believe a crime is in progress then they should dial 999.”

The operator has yet to detail precisely what damage was caused, although the reference to cable replacement suggests that their network was probably hit by another theft of copper telecoms cables. Crimes like this are often driven, at least in part, by the high price of copper. Sadly, the perpetrators of such crimes never have any regard for the harm they cause to locals, some of which are dependent upon the related services.

The good news is that we have been seeing a rise in the number of UK-wide arrests (examples here, here and here), which are often followed by some convictions and have started to dent the activity. Openreach also reported a 30% reduction in cable theft after introducing a new forensic liquid marker (SelectaDNA) to help track and protect their network (here), but that doesn’t cover older cables that are already in the ground.

The ongoing deployment of full fibre (FTTP) lines should, eventually, help to reduce such thefts as fibre has no value to thieves. But this won’t completely stop the problem from occurring because fibre and copper cables often share some of the same ducts (i.e. damaging one also damages the other), and thieves sometimes confuse the two. BT and Openreach will eventually remove their copper cables too, but that’s a much longer process.

Openreach also has a partnership with Crimestoppers, which sometimes offers rewards for information given anonymously to the charity about cable thefts, if it leads to the arrest and conviction of those responsible – you can contact them 100% anonymously on 0800 555 111 or use their anonymous online form. You can also contact Openreach’s security team direct or report via the local police (101), or if you see a crime in progress, then call the police on 999.

UPDATE 16th Oct 2024 @ 11:35am

A spokesperson for Openreach has now indicated that the outage was probably caused by an accident: “We initially believed the cable cut to be criminal damage, but further investigation means we think this could have been accidental damage by a third party, that wasn’t reported to us immediately.”