Rodents Hungry for Fibre Disrupt County Broadband Lines in Norfolk UK

Hundreds of customers connected to the internet via rural full fibre ISP County Broadband (Truespeed) in Norfolk (England) have finally been reconnected after suffering several days of disruption. The situation began after rodents decided to avoid the snow storm and instead adopted a high fibre diet by chomping through both a main and backup fibre link.

According to feedback from some of those impacted by the connectivity loss and the ISP, the problems appear to have started on Saturday night (provider puts it at 9:10pm) after a spokesperson said that an “unusually persistent rodent somehow managed to damage both the main and backup fibre” for an area that served 442 of their customers.

The internet promptly dropped faster than a wheel of cheese in a mouse trap, with the rodents avoiding the need for a WiFi password by simply gnawing their way directly into the network. None of this should come as a surprise because rodents often target telecoms cables (another recent example), with their favourite part being the byte (sorry.. I’ll stop the puns now).

A spokesperson for the provider told ISPreview:

“Our teams worked through Saturday and Sunday but because of the weather, issue complexity, (needed to re-plug 600 metres of optical fibre), location (single track road, rural area, road closure needs etc.) and weather conditions / visibility, we had to suspend work on Sunday night. The repair work resumed on Monday AM and all customers were online by 1400 hours on Monday.”

The provider said they kept customers informed by SMS every 3 hours regarding the status of the issue until resolution (not everybody within this area may have had working access to a mobile signal). But they do acknowledge and apologised for the fact that their call-centre (support) was closed on Sunday, which likely caused some frustration.

Conducting such repairs during snowy conditions often adds an extra layer of considerations, such as the need to operate within health and safety guidelines, which can sometimes – as in this case – cause delays to new network builds and also repair work.

However, feedback from some residents in the area suggests that a few users were still offline until yesterday evening (Tuesday), partly because they apparently needed to conduct a factory reset of their broadband router before it would reconnect; for some reason a simple power cycle wasn’t enough.

At this point, people often comment that network operators should try to do more to stop rats from getting into ducts in the first place, which is a fair point. However, such things are often easier said than done across a large network, where operators often share some of the same physical infrastructure. Rats are also notoriously difficult vermin to stop, like mini tanks with teeth that often seem able to cut through almost anything.. even concrete.