Wildanet Tackle Broadband Service Outages at Multiple Sites in SW England UPDATE2

Customers of alternative broadband provider Wildanet, which has built a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across rural parts of Cornwall and Devon in South West England, have reported a number of different services outages on the network following the impact of last night’s Storm Goretti event.

In a brief statement, posted at 8:28pm last night, the provider said: “We are aware of service interruptions at multiple Wildanet Service Locations. These are related to Storm Goretti. We are actively working with 3rd parties to resolve these issues, please check back for updates.”

At the time of writing, the ISP has not provided any further updates, although some of those affected have informed ISPreview that they’re still offline. One of the confirmed incidents appears to include the outage of an FTTP broadband cabinet in the village of Germoe, which is impacting 152 subscribers but appears to have been caused by a power cut linked to Storm damage (here); possibly a damaged overhead power cable or pole. 

Openreach’s services in the same area still appear to be largely online, so it may be that Wildanet’s power backup solution (if one exists) was not sufficient to cover the event (credits to one of our readers, Badger, for the extra feedback). We have contacted Wildanet for an update, although the National Grid doesn’t expect a resolution until 9am on Sunday (estimated). It’s unclear if any of the other service disruptions are related to power cuts.

Wildanet currently holds the following Project Gigabit broadband roll-out contracts for Cornwall Central (Lot 32.03) and South West (Lot 32.02) – both awarded in January 2023 (here) – and the Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly (Lot 32) contract – awarded in April 2024 (here). The three contracts combined are worth £77m and should help to extend gigabit-capable broadband to over 37,000 additional premises in the county.

UPDATE 11:19am

Wildanet has confirmed that they’re suffering service disruptions in Tregony, Mullion, St Just, Trenance, Veryan, Germoe, Stithians, St Keverne and “are actively working on identifying the problem“.

UPDATE 3:20pm

We’ve had a statement from Wildanet.

A spokesperson for Wildanet told ISPreview:

“Storm Goretti saw extensive and ongoing disruption to the power network in areas of Cornwall overnight which in turn has affected some of our services. Wildanet is working to restore services as soon as possible, as a well as investigating for any non-power related or physical damage to our own network infrastructure.

Our engineering teams have worked throughout Thursday night and today to monitor the impact of the storm, maintaining and restoring our service, where impacted, as quickly as possible. We recognise the importance of our broadband service to customers in times like these and thank our customers for their patience during this period of disruption.

Updates will continue to be provided to affected customers via our website (www.wildanet.com), email and SMS communications.”