Broadband Outage in St Neots After Thieves Steal Openreach Cable

Broadband, phone and Ethernet services in the Cambridgeshire (England) town of St Neots have been disrupted after criminals ripped up and stole around 500 metres worth of Openreach’s (BT) copper telecoms cable, which has impacted four of their fibre street cabinets in the area – serving premises with around 380 customers.

The incident, which occurred on a bridge to the south of the town (A428), appears to have happened at around 3am on Friday (14th Feb) morning. Openreach’s engineers have been busily working to get local homes and businesses back online, with the rodding and roping of new cable taking place last night. The jointing work is then expected to be done by Wednesday, but some customers may be offline until the weekend.

The work will take a few days to complete due to how it occurred near a high traffic roadabout junction and several busy bridge crossings, which has also required temporary traffic lights and other safety measures. Sadly, the perpetrators of such crimes never have any regard for the harm they cause to locals, some of which are dependent upon related services.

In this case, it seems as if local businesses and those on leased lines may have also been hit (credits to Ryan for reporting this), possibly due to the wider damage that occurs when copper cable is so unceremoniously dragged out of the ground. Crimes like this have become increasingly common in recent years, driven in part by the high price of copper and the rising cost of living.

A Spokesperson for Openreach told ISPreview:

“Our engineers are working to replace cabling across various bridges and a busy roundabout and, due to high daytime traffic flow – repairs will need to be carried out at night, primarily to ensure the safety of our engineers and members of the public. We’re aiming to have all customers reconnected by the weekend, if not sooner.”

The good news is that metal theft crimes like this are coming under pressure from a rise in the number of UK-wide arrests (examples here, here and here), which are often followed by some convictions. Openreach also reported a 30% reduction in cable theft last year 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 all of their copper cables, but that’s a much longer process.

Finally, Openreach 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). But if you see a crime in progress, please call the police on 999.