Creative Attempt at Car Parking Wrecks Gigaclear Broadband Cabinet UPDATE
Customers of alternative UK broadband ISP Gigaclear, specifically those who take their full fibre (FTTP) network in the Northamptonshire (England) village of Brixworth South, have been impacted by a complex network outage since Sunday. This occurred after a car discovered a novel approach to parking by wiping out one of the operator’s street cabinets.
The incident, which started just after midnight on Sunday morning (30th March), appears to have disrupted broadband connectivity to a significant part of the village. As can be seen from the image attached to this article (posted with permission from local resident Nick Wilson), Gigaclear’s Street Cabinet suffered serious damage and must now be completely replaced.
Engineering work like this can be extremely complex and often results in several days of local service disruption. The physical cabinet itself was actually replaced on Monday, but the work to restore and splice new fibre cables is currently still ongoing. Thankfully, Gigaclear have been doing a reasonably good job of keeping local customers informed via their service status page.
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According to Nick, Gigaclear has even been making personal calls to impacted residents and offering an additional month’s service for free in the process, which goes above and beyond what we normally see from most other ISPs. The hope is that the first customers should be back online today, and they’re said to be aiming to get everybody else reconnected by tomorrow evening. We’ve reached out to Gigaclear for a comment.
UPDATE 1:16pm
We’ve had a comment back from Gigaclear.
Gigaclear’s Chief Marketing Officer, Nick Rawlings, told ISPreview:
“Our engineers are working hard to repair our network following this incident in Brixworth which caused damage to one of our cabinets. We are on track to have all customers back online by the end of the day on Thursday (3rd April). Our Customer Services team has proactively contacted all impacted customers and ensured they are fully informed on the situation.
Whilst incidents like this are extremely rare across our network, when they happen it can cause disruption and I am proud of how our teams have responded. We know how important reliable broadband is in the rural communities we serve and when things like this occur, keeping in touch with our customers is vitally important.”
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 Linkedin.
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Rock on, Gigaclear!
Now, if only I had access to you guys! But nooooo. I’m still over here waiting for OpenReach to do something magnificent, or for Nexfibre to open their wholesale offerings up.
Woe.
If only they would offer me a >1gbps package!! 🙁
The driver’s insurance company will pick up the tab for all this. So, if I were Gigaclear, I would get it back as quickly as possible and offer a free month for the disruption as it is great publicity. Some anti-ramraid bollards around the cabinet wouldn’t go amiss.
The driver needs fining and their insurance premiums should go up.
Don’t always assume. In ‘current day job’ we had the same. We were all quick to assume boyracer. Turned out to be an elderly driver who had a medical emergency whilst driving (stroke).
Given the time of day it happened there’s always a chance the driver was p***ed.
Anyone inconvenienced should be claiming direct to the driver’s insurance company, whether it was a genuine accident or not.
Reading this, I’ve just realised that since moving to FTTP we don’t lose our internet everytime the old local cabinet gets vandalised, set alight, flooded, or driven into. The beauty of living on Teesside, it’s just like Shameless, the live experience!
One of many advantages to the end user. Now if only Openreach would stop insisting on rolling out FTTP via poles. As soon as the wind blows, they are easily damaged compared to underground cables.
There’s plenty of things that can damage underground cables. Rats having a nibble, chemical ingress, folk digging stuff up, or someone parking a Range Rover or something on the pavement and breaking a joint box. Poles don’t have a particularly elevated fault risk compared to underground feeds.
My Mum can get Gigaclear but she refuses to swap as she dose not want the hassle. I do understand as I can now get fibre from Open Reach, but Virgin Media do up to 1 Gigabit via coaxial cable. It might not be fibre but is more than fast enough , and Virgin Media always match or bet other companies.
Match price, maybe. But there is a reason why Gigaclear have a rating of 4.7 on Trustpilot versus VirginMedia with a rating of 1.4.
Buyer beware!
VM can’t compete with an ALTNET on its coax network. The latency reduction makes everything feel snappier even if you are on lower tier speed package. One house is 3.6 ms latency on average – the same route tested on VM is 24ms and the VM connection is in a good area, not an over utilised one. Now I realise that is just one area and it would vary, but in another area in outer London, the same route on a VM coax connection was 17ms.
And VM do not like to price match with an ALTNET, they usually prefer to accept disconnection put in. It depends on the retentions agent, but a lot of people on VM’s own customer forum have walked because they wouldn’t price match; a lot were long term customers.
I have two connections, 500/500 from gigaclear on their point to point network (not gpon) and 2000/2000 from vermin on their xgspon network.
I despise vermin don’t get me wrong, but gigaclear refuse to compete on speed, so is relegated to backup connection.
Service quality is very similar. Except that gigaclear use cgnat.
Great customer comms, so well done GigaClear, but this exemplifies the danger of using cabinets, rather than exchange buildings for locating active equipment. And of course it would be best not to locate a cabinet facing oncoming traffic. Hopefully lessons will be learnt? Wonder what the customer split is between GigaClear and Openreach in Brixworth?
Keep in mind that the original Gigaclear network served areas where there was no Openreach and was in effect ‘rural’. They later moved to market towns where that logic would apply.
In the days before XGS-PON, locally-placed cabinets with active equipment was the only viable way to provide symmetric fibre speeds.
PON is popular with telcos for good reasons, even if “feels” inferior to those not deep in the necessary compromises for commercial viability.
A bit like transformer sites at airports . . .where its now being reported that cable theft may have been involved “Anything can happen in the next half hour” . . . (Troy Tempest). Thank the diety the NCA are on the case of this strategic issue . . . not.
Silly me, they’ll already be heavily engaged ensuring that country pedestrians and ramblers from the connurbations observe the “Don’t walk” signs or chasing down the authors of those “Hurty feelings” internet forum posts.
I am surprised that, in an open field situation like that they don’t revette the cabinets with an earth bank . . . being mindful of the proximity of heavy farming machinery and such like.
Ugh it’s a nightmare when someone does that. Can take weeks to repair. Great to see Gigaclear on the case though and working as fast as they can to restore services.
Travelling behind a workman’s van on the M40 today. My curiousity was aroused by what appeared to be two separate pieces of tape adhered to the rear door, surrounding top and bottom the handle and bearing an illegible inscription (At 60 feet). On getting within reading visual distance I saw that the upper piece of tape bore the text “DON’T BOTHER” in capitals and the lower piece of tape stated “TOOLS STORED IN SDECURE LOCATION”
Great communication from Gigaclear, regular status updates and a decent goodwill gesture. If only more ISPs were like this.