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A Spider Surprise for One of Openreach’s Engineers in Staffordshire

Tuesday, Jan 14th, 2025 (4:30 pm) - Score 17,120
Openreach-Linkedin-Image-of-Spider-in-Cable-Box-14th-Jan-2025

Spiders have an awkward habit of getting pretty much everywhere imaginable, which is probably down to their deep connection to the web. But spare a thought for one of Openreach’s UK broadband engineers in the Staffordshire village of Hixon who, while working on top of a telecoms pole, had to do a bit of extra debugging after opening up a cable box to find this surprise.

Over the years we’ve seen plenty of animal and insect related damage occurring on UK broadband networks, from swarms of Bees or Wasps occupying street cabinets (here), to Badgers blocking access to cable ducts, and hungry Rodents chewing through vital optical fibre cables (here). Nature certainly has an endless box of surprises for the budding engineer, and today is no different.

According to Openreach, one of their Patch Lead’s, Mark, had a little surprise during a coaching session. He came across this eight-legged “friend” who’d set up shop at the top of a pole in Hixon, Staffordshire. Clearly the spider didn’t realise that Halloween had already passed and instead left the engineer with a touch of extra bug-testing to perform.

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Nothing a good hoover can’t resolve, of course, although Openreach are clearly being a bit more PR sensitive to this particular guest than our household would be to such issues. But each to their own, we just hope the little thing got a chance to check their webmail before being disconnected. And with that, I was out of spider puns. But then, this is what happens when you spend too much time on the web. Ok.. enough.

A Spokesperson for Openreach said:

“Our eight-legged friends are super important to the UK’s ecosystem, providing a tasty snack for lots of birds and lizards. They’re also pros at pest control! This reduces the need for pesticides and helps maintain ecological balance.

But our spidey friends are having a rough time, with their numbers dropping due to habitat loss and changes. So, when we’re working on our network, we always keep a lookout for them and keep them safe. It’s a tiny thing we can do that makes a big difference to our local environment.”

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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, BlueSky, Threads.net and .
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Comments
18 Responses

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  1. Avatar photo htmm says:

    Customer: My internet connection is not working!
    ISP: Your web access is just fine.

  2. Avatar photo Daza says:

    Mandatory flame throwers for every employee.

  3. Avatar photo Joe Pineapples says:

    That’s tonight’s nightmare sorted

  4. Avatar photo Paul says:

    This happens all the time ,you just escort them off the premises

  5. Avatar photo Les Oswald says:

    Hello Mark, love your website, it’s my go to source for anything related to ISPs.

    I a retired university sysadmin and network manager but my background is in Zoology.

    The spider is a classic example of Tegenaria domestic, aka House Spider. They are thought to have originated as cave dwellers an OR have given them a little cave up a pole.

    I hope that OR won’t be charging them rent or bandwidth!

  6. Avatar photo G says:

    Slow news day ? Quite literally a daily occurrence for us telecoms guys out in the field

    1. Mark-Jackson Mark Jackson says:

      I occasionally inject light-hearted stories like this, as they’re a bit of fun and help to show the sort of oddities that engineers often have to tackle. It’s a side of the engineer’s job that people often don’t see.

    2. Avatar photo Alex says:

      Keep doing it Mark. You do an amazing job.

    3. Avatar photo DustBuster says:

      I liked this, must be a creepy job, bet they wish they had a Dust Buster which by astonishing concidence is the username I’m still hoping the Guardian Admins will permit to join the esteemed halls of this site’s forum, so I can converse with the great and the wise about all things ISP & mobile.

      Not sure if my VPN caused concern but, I hereby promise I’m not a spammer, scammer – or angry mob of displaced arachnids in a trenchcoat. 🙂

  7. Avatar photo Dave "MW0DCM" in R.C.T. says:

    Love my spiders and everything Tech, but my partner and my 2 ex wives don’t see it that way!
    Since moving just 5 mins away from our old property in Tylorstown, we’ve gone from loads of spiders and crappy FTTC to hardly any spiders and Gigabit internet, yup the internet here in Rural South Wales Rhondda Valleys is very patchy, but getting there, here’s hoping most of the engineers on the job don’t mind the odd Arachnid, else they’ll be screaming from the top of the poll “I’m an Openreach Engineer, get me out of here!”
    Household spiders can live up to 40+years as long as they stay out the way of Hoovers and other implements… Just a shame it takes this long to get an issue sorted
    Here’s to the guys that get the work done for us mortals to use the internet etc!

  8. Avatar photo Two legs and two arms or two wings good, eight legs bad. says:

    Birds eat spiders. True!
    Spiders eat insects. True!
    Birds eat insects. True but not mentioned.

    So spiders compete with birds. Birds could eat the insects directly, or spiders can eat them first and then the birds eat the spiders. There is loss along the food chain. Birds get more if they eat the insects themselves.

    Insects have co-evolved with spiders. Their reproductive rate is sufficient for their quantity to be limited by their available food supply, not by predators.

    Conclusion: Spiders don’t reduce the quantity of insects. They reduce the quantity of birds.

    Take “quantity” to mean weight of the totel population.

    Acknowledged to be partly oversimplified: Insects eat insects. Spiders eat spiders. Insects (like ants) eat spiders.

    Ignore all these effects and take the rough figure that a cold blooded predator population neeeds a food supply 4 times its own weight and that the corresponding figure for a warm blooded spider population is 10 times.

    Then 4kg of insects can sustain 1kg of spiders (which can sustain 100g of birds) or they can sustain 400g of birds directly.

    Conclusion from this: 1kg of spiders costs 300g of birds.

    Final acknowledgement: I’m not a zoologist but an interested lay person. There may be more to this, which it would be good to read if a professional replied.

    1. Avatar photo Two legs and two arms or two wings good, eight legs bad. says:

      Correction: “warm blooded predator”, not “warm blooded spider”, which would obviously be nonsense.

    2. Avatar photo Yella says:

      “Insects have co-evolved with spiders. Their reproductive rate is sufficient for their quantity to be limited by their available food supply, not by predators.”

      While I understand your comment, it’s only valid if nature is the sole factor. But there’s no shortage of food for flies and other insects that breed in garbage and decay and there never will be while we’re here. Spiders absolutely do not compete with Birds, pesticides do that much more effectively.

    3. Avatar photo Two legs and two arms or two wings good, eight legs bad. says:

      @ Yella says:

      By contrast to spiders and birds, pesticides can have a real impact on the quantity of insects — and of spiders. Yes, nature isn’t the only factor, except in the sense that we are part of it. Cats can have an impact on the quantity of birds only because they are fed regularly, which makes them much more common than they could ever be if they actually had to live by hunting.

      I am not sure in what sense one could regard pesticides as competitors of birds. The pesticide doesn’t benefit from doing its job, while both birds and spiders benefit from insects as a resource.

      For a determination of their net impact, I don’t see how one could (for example) regard wind turbines and domesticated cats as competitors. I see that cats wouldn’t want the remains of a bird killed by a wind turbine, so that the turbine spoils the cat’s sport. I also see, that the cat AND the turbine complicate the ecological relationship between insects, spiders and birds, by turning birds into insect food.

      What I do not see, is how the presence of new factors introduced by humans alters the fact that the insect eaten by a spider is no longer available for birds to eat. It seems to me, that we could only alter the fundamental relationships by introducing domesticated insects, or domesticated spiders, or domesticated birds. In that sense, I acknowledge that my comment may be inapplicable in areas full of free-range poultry.

      I value your reply and never wish to persist in error, but it seems to me that additional factors only reduce, possibly drastically, the accuracy of my rough calculation of the impact of spiders, without altering the qualitative aspect of my observations.

      Yes, factors introduced by humans dominate, which is why most urban birds feed on waste and not on insects, but my original comment was never concerned with all or indeed any of this, merely with flaws I perceive in the notion that spiders keep down insects. An invasive super-spider with a hunting strategy to which native insects are not adapted could certainly do that. Most predators can limit the available RANGE of SOME petential prey. But the notion that spiders native to a habitat can impact insects native to the same habitat still seems mistaken to me.

  9. Avatar photo J says:

    Literally every DP is like this!

  10. Avatar photo SicOf says:

    Remember: If you wish to live and thrive, let the spider run alive…

    Ahh the organic growth of web technology continues, naturally…

  11. Avatar photo NE555 says:

    I love that the OR engineer is described as a “Patch Lead”. Presumably wears RJ45 boots!

  12. Avatar photo CrazyFool says:

    So these cable boxes arent IPxx whatever rated?

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