Openreach Damages Netomnia’s Main Fibre Optic Cable Near Bristol
Hundreds of customers on Netomnia’s (Substantial Group) alternative broadband network in the Bristol (South West England) area, which has now covered 2.8 million UK premises RFS (inc. 400,000 customers) with their full fibre (FTTP) lines, are suffering connectivity problems after Openreach “took down one of our main cables” yesterday afternoon.
According to a brief service status update, which was posted to the website of their main ISP, YouFibre: “We are currently experiencing issues in the Filton area. If you are in the area and you are experiencing issues, please rest assured that we are already working hard to resolve the issues. Thank you for your patience.”
Filton is a town about 6 miles north of Bristol on one of Netomnia’s main fibre links into the city. Details of the outage remain unclear, although Netomnia’s CEO, Jeremy Chelot, this morning stated via X that Openreach’s engineers were to blame: “Sorry Bristol, Openreach took down one of our main cables yesterday evening! We have c.500 customers impacted!”
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The latest update a few minutes ago indicates that the number of customers still offline is around 200-300. ISPreview understands that the accident occurred at around 5pm yesterday, while Openreach’s engineers were working to pull a new sub duct, albeit breaking Netomnia’s duct/cable at the same time. Repairs to main fibre links can be complex and time-consuming, although Netomnia hope to have it fixed by tonight.
Sadly, such accidents, while rare, do occasionally occur when network operators need to work in close proximity to each other’s infrastructure (Netomnia runs a lot of their fibre via Openreach’s existing cable ducts and poles). Thankfully, this outage only impacts part of Netomnia’s network in the Bristol area. The operator has invested £47.7m to deploy their fibre across 159,000 premises in the area.
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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I had the same thing happen locally last year. BT in doing their work on the cable had expanded their use in the under pavement area beyond the space available and hammered the cover shut cutting cityfibres cable in the process. They denied they had even been there.
I wouldn’t just assume these incidents are accidental, they seemed to have a cavalier disregard for their competitors equipment, acted maliciously and lied about it.
suspect it happens to Openreach network much more than alnets, but Openreach tend not to gob off about it. pretty unprofessional comment from Netomnia
Nonsense. The damage was almost certainly done by a subcontractor, who would not consider Netomnia a ‘competitor’. They’re just another telecoms company. Someone else they might work for in the future.
Use your own infrastructure if you don’t want this sort of risk Jeremy. Can you imagine Clive Selley posting on social media about another fibre provider damaging Openreach network such as when Netomnia knocked out some DSLAM’s in Guildford
Its only pay back
Imagine Openreach publicly sent a message out with who’s to blame every time an alt net, council or other utility damaged one of their cables.
I’d imagine the CEO will also publicly apologise every time one of their engineers damages another competitors network from now on…..
Wait till the mobile operators “Accidentally” bend an antenna or do similar… Towers cover a larger area especially on 800MHz here in the rural Valleys of South Wales…
I can imagine it “Bryn it’s b’there” “b’where? Oh b’there!” Snap!
Yeah.. we can’t have network operators being transparent about who caused the damage to their networks.. that would be terrible [end sarcasm]. I for one would welcome operators doing that as naming and shaming has a tendency to collectively reduce bad practice.
Certainly unprofessional.
Damage can occur at anytime people are working. Ideally networks are installed and only maintenance visits are needed and with fibre that should be seldom.
Engineers will have been careful but with the lack of quality by subcontractors I have personally seen it is a difficult issue and Openreach have a lot of copper to remove going forward and the Altnets using PIA are not making that easy.
I am sure Openreach are experiencing multiple damage issues daily to their fibre and copper.
Let he who has no sins cast the first rope burn.
Very unprofessional behaviour from the CEO.
Apologizing to the customers is a good move
The customer is king
Staying silent is what is unprofessional and not caring at all
All this stuff about “being professional”. I’d much rather companies and CEOs be transparent and reveal the root cause of issues (whether caused by themselves, others, or acts of god), it’s much less frustrating than being kept in the dark for god knows how long. This goes the other way too, if Netomnia were to damage Openreach’s infrastructure I would want them to disclose that as well, their loss if they decide not to.
AltNets was an insane vision that should never have occured. The UK would be better off with a single government owned, privately run, telecoms infrastructure provider. Having sometime 3 or 4 different fibre optic companies piggy backing off of 1 companies infrastructure is madness. All utility companies damage altnets cables because they are poorly installed and hard to locate predig. On the other hand I know for a fact that the altnets have damaged a lot of utilities in the cavalier way they installed their infrastructure.
The government created a wild west of telecommunications infrastructure and we are simply reap what’s been sown.
Just saying, you upset the fibre masters, who put you all on the C table you pay the price of time, always pay your man, especially if he knows your network.
Having worked in the network for the last 29 years I can tell you categorically that the alt nets will do ANYTHING to get their cables into already overcrowded underground conduits, even if it means taking existing working cables out!! Openreach will arrive at a fault caused by these alt nets and instead of ripping out the recently installed cables to put their own cables back in, they have to work another way out at their expense!!