Repair Ship Cable Vigilance Aims to Fix Shetland Subsea Fibre Break by Thursday

Good news. Broadband and mobile services on the remote Shetland and Orkney Islands (Scotland), which have been disrupted since part of the main SHEFA-2 (Faroese Telecom) submarine (subsea) fibre optic cable was damaged over a week ago (here), could be restored as soon as this Wednesday or Thursday after the French repair ship ‘Cable Vigilance‘ arrived.

Just to recap. Faroese Telecom’s SHEFA-2 cable reaches Shetland via two landing sites, including one stretch that goes North West up to the Faroe Islands and another cable that runs south to connect Orkney and the Scottish Mainland. In addition, BT recently deployed an additional subsea fibre link between Shetland and Orkney as part of the ongoing R100 project, although this one isn’t fully live yet and may not be utilised by every operator.

The current situation started at around 3am on Saturday 26th July 2025 after damage occurred on the section of SHEFA-2 that runs between Orkney and Banff (Aberdeenshire). A fishing vessel is understood to have caused and reported the damage to the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) a day after the incident occurred.

Shetland Telecom promptly stated that their own internet customers were “unaffected as traffic switched to our resilient route via Faroe“, while Openreach said that “hundreds” of their customers suffered broadband disruption (across multiple ISPs like BT, Sky Broadband etc.) and Vodafone’s mobile services were also hit.

Such breaks can sometimes take several weeks to fully repair, which is partly due to the delay in arranging for a cable repair ship to be dispatched, as well as uncertainty around the scale of damage and weather. Repair ships have recently been in quite high demand, and this week’s arrival of Storm Floris didn’t help. But the good news is that the cable repair ship is now on site.

Shetland Telecom Statement

The cable ship has successfully found the fault and buoyed off the north and south ends of the broken cable. Based on the weather forecast, the repair is due to start early on Tuesday 5th. The expected time for the service to be re-established is Wednesday 6th or Thursday 7th.

In terms of alternative options, residents on Shetland can now purchase packages via Starlink’s LEO satellite broadband network, which may be a useful alternative for redundancy. However, Vodafone (VodafoneThree) did recently announce that they had begun a new “feasibility study”, which will explore the possibility and cost of deploying a new subsea fibre optic cable to help transform broadband and mobile connectivity on the Shetland Islands and boost resilience (here).