Tiree Island Suffers Protracted Broadband Outage After Subsea Cable Break

Apparently, Shetland wasn’t the only remote UK island to suffer broadband and phone disruption (here) due to a broken subsea fibre cable after Storm Amy struck Scotland earlier this month. Homes and businesses on the tiny Inner Hebrides island of Tiree are suffering from a similar problem, but have been left with much more uncertainty over its resolution.

Just to recap. Tiree is a low-lying island that is home to a population of around 700. The island’s subsea fibre cable, which runs between the village of Scarinish on Tiree and Calgary on Mull (pictured – see red arrow), was first deployed all the way back in 2014 as part of the Digital Scotland contract with BT (i.e. the BT Highlands and Islands Submarine Cable System).

According to the BBC News, Tiree’s subsea fibre was also damaged during Storm Amy, which has forced local connectivity to rely on a slow and capacity strained temporary Starlink-based satellite broadband link for backhaul, which has been provided by BT (this supports a community-owned network, run by Tiree Broadband).

However, islanders claim they have been given no assurances about who will underwrite the cost of the satellite data connectivity (the community ISP may need to pay £10k a month to keep the island online), and repairs to the fibre are not currently expected to take place until December. As with the situation in Shetland, the damaged subsea cable rests in shallow water about 600 metres offshore, which will require both a barge and a period of calm weather for the repairs to take place.

Rhoda Meek, Tiree Community Development Trust, said:

“At one point during Storm Amy there was no means of communicating with emergency services beyond making a call through an analogue phone line. Some of the phone companies have been completely missing since it happened, their masts are completely out. EE and BT have 4G up but the signal is very erratic – you’ve got people out in gardens trying to get hot spots for connections.

We’re asking people not to stream anything and not to have video calls, because we can’t risk data access getting worse. It shouldn’t be the community that this is having to pay this data. It’s a lot of money for a community trust to find.”

A BT spokesperson said:

“BT’s Emergency Response Team has worked across the community to keep Tiree connected following network infrastructure damage caused by Storm Amy. We’ve deployed temporary solutions that have allowed BT to maintain essential connectivity services for existing customers.

This includes Tiree Broadband, and we’re continuing to discuss options to keep connectivity in place for them until full service is restored.”

The Scottish Government have indicated that they’re “liaising closely” with BT, Openreach and other key partners to ensure the subsea fibre connection to Tiree is “restored as soon as possible“. The issue has naturally raised a few concerns about the dependence of the island on a single subsea fibre link, but then such is the challenge with small and extremely remote island communities.

However, it’s worth noting that locals could order their own direct Starlink broadband connections, which would circumvent the capacity problems from sharing a single enterprise grade terminal via the local community network. Starlink’s roaming option would probably suit this quite well, since it doesn’t attach a long contract term and can be re-activated when needed (they also have a ‘Standby Mode’ for a small monthly fee for emergency messaging and basic tasks etc.).