Squirrel with High Fibre Diet Disrupts Netomnia’s Broadband in Manchester

Apparently the odd squirrel in Manchester (England) has developed a taste for Netomnia’s optical fibre network after one of them went nuts while taking a mega-bite out of the network operator’s overhead broadband cable in the city, which caused a brief case of nut-working failure for at least one or two of their customers.

Over the years we’ve reported on lots of animal and insect related damage occurring on the UK’s many fixed broadband and mobile networks. From swarms of bees or wasps occupying cabinets (here), to badgers blocking access to cable ducts, spiders decorating the inside of connection boxes with dense webs (here), and rodents (rats and dormice) frequently chewing through vital fibre optic and copper cables (here and here).

Suffice to say that being a telecoms engineer today requires a degree of personal fortitude in more ways than one, not least because you never quite know what sort of wildlife is going to pop out at you from the local network infrastructure from one day to the next. In this case the guilty squirrel is understood to have left the scene before engineers arrived to investigate, but thankfully the connection has since been restored.

“The issue was reported at 3pm, and by 1pm the following day the damaged fibre had been replaced, tested, and fully restored (no squirrels were harmed in the process). It’s a small but memorable example of what sits behind network resilience. Faults aren’t always predictable, but clear escalation, experienced teams, and effective coordination make all the difference,” said a spokesperson for Netomnia.

Squirrels don’t actually have any interest in eating the cables themselves, but their teeth do grow continuously (up to 8 inches a year) and that often forces them to gnaw on hard objects (and apparently also optical fibre cables) as a means of wearing them down. In that sense we can say that this squirrel may not in fact have a high fibre diet for telecoms, but clearly they heard the internet had great branch offices. Sorry, I’ll stop with the puns now.

Despite this, it’s uncommon to see damage being caused by squirrels, with rats being by far the most disruptive vermin to modern telecoms infrastructure.