Car Fire Triggers 3 Week Openreach Broadband Outage in East Sussex Village

Some residents in the semi-rural village of Catsfield in East Sussex (England), which is home to nearly 900 people, have been left without access to fixed broadband and phone services for roughly three weeks after a car fire caused damage to Openreach’s nearby telecoms pole and fibre optic cables.

Resolving such problems in urban areas is normally a lot quicker and a downed or damage pole can often be corrected within only a matter of hours, or a few short days. But the wait for rural villages is often a lot longer and there can often be mitigating circumstances that may cause an additional wait.

Openreach has previously informed ISPreview that it can take around 20 days to fix damaged poles, such as after a major storm. But over the years we’ve seen examples where, in rare cases of extreme damage, rural areas have been left to wait for several months before repairs (here, here and here).

Such long waits can stem from a variety of issues, such as with the need to seek prior permission for traffic management, safety considerations and limited local resources etc. According to the BBC News (see for pictures of the car), the long delay in Catsfield seems to be at least partly related to the fact that they had to allow extra time for Sussex Police to investigate before the burnt-out car could be removed, which has now finally happened.

A spokesperson for Openreach said:

“We’re aware of an incident where a third-party vehicle fire damaged part of our network, affecting a small number of customers.

Our engineers are working to get everyone back up and running as quickly and safely as possible. We’re sorry for the disruption and appreciate everyone’s patience.”

At present it’s not known precisely when Openreach will be able to complete replacement of the pole and its cables. In the meantime, some locals are complaining of patchy mobile signals, which has caused concern over the difficulty of contacting family, friends and the emergency services.

However, it should be noted that the quality of mobile coverage in the area does vary between the networks (Vodafone seems poor, but O2, EE and Three UK do have modest to good outdoor coverage), yet calls to the emergency services will usually connect via roaming to the best available signal (i.e. it’s not dependent on who you have your contract with).

In addition, the area also has access to Trooli’s alternative Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband network, but they often run their fibre via Openreach’s existing poles and ducts, which means that the outage may potentially also be impacting their network in the area too.