Home
 » ISP News » 
Sponsored Links

Broadband Operators Warned to Brace for Storm Eowyn on Friday

Thursday, Jan 23rd, 2025 (11:22 am) - Score 2,240
Storm-Eowyn-on-Friday-24th-Jan-2025-Met-Office-Picture

A number of network operators, such as Openreach (BT), have put out notifications to warn partners and customers about the expected impact of Storm Éowyn tomorrow morning. The named storm is expected to be particularly vicious when it strikes Ireland, which is why it’s generating some headlines online, although its impact upon the UK will still be nasty.

The storm itself is the result of explosive cyclogenesis (aka – a weather bomb), which reflects a low-pressure system whose central pressure falls 24 millibars in 24 hours. Yesterday the Met Office reported that the storm had a central air pressure of 1001hPa, but that this was expected to drop by 62hPa over the following 30 hours (yikes). At the time of writing, the storm’s core is at around 971hPa.

NOTE: Red Warnings for wind are in place across Northern Ireland and a big area of central / south-west Scotland, with gusts of up to 100mph forecast.

Needless to say, extremely damaging winds (including major gusts), heavy rain, lightning and snow (in some areas) are to be expected. Most of the concern about this being a potentially “historic storm” are coming from Ireland, where it seems likely to be particularly nasty. But Storm Éowyn (pronounced ‘Ay-oh-win’) will still be very nasty for Northern Ireland, as well as northern parts of Wales, England, and a lot of Scotland.

Advertisement

In a brief statement, Openreach said: “We’re closely monitoring the situation and have activated our established storm response processes to minimise potential disruptions. In areas under Amber weather warnings, we may need to defer some tasks until it is safe to proceed. Across all regions, risk assessments will be carried out, prioritising the safety of our engineers.”

Storms like this have a tendency to knock down trees and cause flooding, which can impact broadband street cabinets and telecoms poles, among other things. In the aftermath, we’re likely to see Openreach place some areas under their Matters Beyond Our Reasonable Control (MBORC) designation, which could mean delays to new service provisions as repairs take priority. Other network operators in the worst hit areas may have similar challenges.

Storm-Eowyn-Jan-2025-Met-Office-Map

Share with Twitter
Share with Linkedin
Share with Facebook
Share with Reddit
Share with Pinterest
Tags:
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 .
Search ISP News
Search ISP Listings
Search ISP Reviews
Comments
4 Responses

Advertisement

  1. Avatar photo Joyce Whittle says:

    With the prediction of increased storms in the future due to climate change , the seas warming and hence likely more severe storm occurrence .
    It makes you wonder the thought processes and buisness decisions to build new infrastructure by telegraph poles and masts rather than invest in underground infrastructure .
    Especially where much of this new infrastructure is duplication and more and exists in areas where newer infrastructure had already gone underground . Most of this replication in Urban areas ,where risks of damage caused should telegraph poles or masts be damage would be increased . Doesn’t make any sense

    1. Avatar photo Hull Massive says:

      Your comment doesn’t make any sense either. Try again in English with correct use of punctuation and tense among other things.

  2. Avatar photo Dan says:

    Soon some people are going to have to rely on these networks for their telephone calls and more importantly, calls to emergency services.

    Surely these networks, using modern technology, should be more reliable, more resilient and we shouldn’t be worried about them being knocked out by a storm?

  3. Avatar photo james smith says:

    H-W Joyce’s text is not a problem to the rest of us. Though I would say that having communications cables near tress should be avoided, because you are relying on the tree owners to remove dead bits before strong winds do.

    Underground is all well and good but it needs protection from flooding or accidental damage,for example a water company digging when they repair a damaged pipe

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

NOTE: Your comment may not appear instantly (it may take several hours) due to static caching and moderation checks by the anti-spam system. Please be patient. We will reject comments that spam, troll, post via known fake IP/proxy servers or fall foul of our Online Safety and Content Policy.
Javascript must be enabled to post (most browsers do this automatically)

Privacy Notice: Please note that news comments are anonymous, which means that we do NOT require you to enter any real personal details to post a message. By clicking to submit a post you agree to storing your entries for comment content, display name, IP and email in our database, for as long as the post remains live.

Only the submitted name and comment will be displayed in public, while the rest will be kept private (we will never share this outside of ISPreview, regardless of whether the data is real or fake). This comment system uses submitted IP, email and website address data to spot abuse and spammers. All data is transferred via an encrypted (https secure) session.
Cheap BIG ISPs for 100Mbps+
Community Fibre UK ISP Logo
100Mbps
Gift: None
Vodafone UK ISP Logo
Vodafone £23.00
150Mbps
Gift: None
Youfibre UK ISP Logo
Youfibre £23.99
150Mbps
Gift: None
NOW UK ISP Logo
NOW £25.00
100Mbps
Gift: None
Virgin Media UK ISP Logo
Virgin Media £25.99
132Mbps
Gift: None
Large Availability | View All
Cheapest ISPs for 100Mbps+
BeFibre UK ISP Logo
BeFibre £19.00
150Mbps
Gift: None
Community Fibre UK ISP Logo
100Mbps
Gift: None
Gigaclear UK ISP Logo
Gigaclear £19.00
300Mbps
Gift: None
toob UK ISP Logo
toob £22.00
150Mbps
Gift: None
Vodafone UK ISP Logo
Vodafone £23.00
150Mbps
Gift: None
Large Availability | View All
The Top 15 Category Tags
  1. FTTP (6162)
  2. BT (3694)
  3. Politics (2780)
  4. Business (2488)
  5. Openreach (2447)
  6. Building Digital UK (2365)
  7. Mobile Broadband (2205)
  8. FTTC (2094)
  9. Statistics (1953)
  10. 4G (1859)
  11. Virgin Media (1814)
  12. Ofcom Regulation (1619)
  13. Fibre Optic (1492)
  14. Wireless Internet (1478)
  15. 5G (1456)
Promotion
Sponsored

Copyright © 1999 to Present - ISPreview.co.uk - All Rights Reserved - Terms , Privacy and Cookie Policy , Links , Website Rules , Contact
Mastodon