Cable Thieves Knock Out Openreach Broadband in County Durham Village

Broadband internet connectivity across part of the County Durham (England) village of Shotton Colliery was left disconnected for five days earlier this week after Openreach’s local network was targeted by copper cable thieves. The activity also caused damage to some local fibre optic cables.

The incident appears to have begun on Friday last week and some locals initially attributed the outage to Storm Amy, although Openreach later confirmed that it had been the result of metal theft on their network. The operator’s engineers then began busily working to get local homes and businesses back online as quickly as possible, which was only fully restored yesterday.

We should point out that Openreach doesn’t yet appear to have covered the village with their latest full fibre (FTTP) network, although both Netomnia (Youfibre, Brsk) and Virgin Media (nexfibre) have deployed gigabit-capable broadband services across the community.

Netomnia shares some of Openreach’s local infrastructure, and we believe they were also impacted by the disruption (they only recently suffered another network attack in the same county – here). 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.

An Openreach spokesperson said (Northern Echo):

“We’re deeply disappointed that this community is suffering the consequences of a criminal act targeting our network. Our security team is working closely with the Police to catch those responsible.

Engineers have been working around the clock and have restored broadband services. These attacks cause extensive disruption to local lives, threaten the safety of vulnerable individuals, and result in significant inconvenience for residents and businesses.

We urge people to call 101 to report any suspicious activity around our network to the police; if members of the public do believe a crime is in progress, then they should dial 999.”

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. But the criminals are also 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), although it doesn’t cover older cables that are already in the ground.

The ongoing deployment of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband lines should, eventually, help to reduce such thefts as fibre has no value to thieves. But as with the above example, 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. Completely removing core copper cables will take quite a few years.

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.