BT Confirm Delay to Subsea Fibre Optic Cable Repair Ship for Orkney

The UK telecoms giant, BT, has confirmed that a subsea cable repair ship, which is needed to resolve the recent break between Evie on the Orkney Mainland and nearby Westray, has been delayed due to bad weather and will not now arrive to carry out the work until next week. But local 4G mobile connectivity has been improved.

As reported a couple of weeks ago (here), the “major” incident began on Monday 16th March 2026 (cause remains unclear) and promptly disrupted both fixed broadband and some mobile connectivity for over 500 customers in the North Isles (inc. Eday, Stronsay and Sanday) – part of an archipelago off the northeastern coast of Scotland.

The situation initially meant that only landline phones in the area were still functional, as well as mobile services from EE and Three UK, although capacity issues did seem to be impacting 4G based mobile broadband connectivity. After a few days most of Vodafone’s (VodafoneThree) mobile customers were also back online, once they were able to harness a second Three UK site on Westray to share coverage.

BT had hoped that the cable repair ship they’d ordered would arrive this week to start work, but the latest update indicates that it won’t now be able to start repairs until sometime next week (credits to The Orcadian).

A BT spokesman said:

“Due to adverse weather conditions, the cable repair vessel is unable to safely carry out the required work this week.

We apologise to customers for the continued inconvenience and expect repair work to begin as soon as it is safe. In the meantime, our teams have now completed work to restore connectivity at priority sites, with further work scheduled over the coming days to deploy interim solutions at local community hubs.”

According to a separate update from the Stronsay Development Trust, quite a lot of work has been done over the past couple of weeks to reconnect key public sector sites, using 4G and Starlink satellite broadband hubs (community members can also use these sites to get online). In addition, O2 (Virgin Media) have completed work to bring back all three of their mobile mast sites on Westray, Sanday and North Ronaldsay, utilising Starlink as backhaul for 4G connectivity.

A number of local residents are also known to be using direct Starlink connections and even sharing some of their capacity out with neighbours. But in normal circumstances we’d usually caution against sharing your home internet connectivity with neighbours, as you can’t always guarantee that somebody within another household won’t do something illegal with it.

Sadly, it’s not unusual for complex subsea cable breaks like this to sometimes take several weeks to fully repair, which is partly due to the time it takes to survey the break and arrange a cable repair ship to be dispatched, as well as uncertainty around the scale of damage and unpredictable weather conditions.