Copper cable thieves strike Essex town and disrupt Openreach’s broadband

More than 2,000 metres of Openreach’s older copper broadband and phone cable has been stolen from around the Essex (England) town of South Woodham Ferrers, which is home to a population of c.16,000. The criminal activity is understood to have caused “significant disruption” to local telecoms services for homes and businesses.

According to the Essex County News, the latest incident is understood to have occurred on 19th October 2026 and follows a similar theft of telecoms cable on 12st August in the same area. Openreach have since been able to restore access to their full fibre (FTTP) broadband network and apparently their engineers are trying to reconnect the operator’s remaining services “as quickly as possible“.

Crimes like this have become increasingly common in recent years, driven in part by the high price of copper and the rising cost of living. Such criminals have no regard for the disruption they cause, which in this case has resulted in a protracted service outage. Disruption like this can be particularly serious for vulnerable residents (e.g. telecare users) and that’s to say nothing of the high costs involved with actually repairing the damage.

A spokesperson for Openreach said:

“Residents, businesses and our teams are all bearing the brunt of this criminal behaviour. More than 2,000 metres of cable has been stolen this month alone, causing significant disruption and leaving our engineers with complex and time-consuming repairs.

We’re incredibly grateful to the community for their patience while we work to get everyone reconnected.”

Earlier this year Openreach revealed that, since April 2024, more than 100,000 people across the UK had temporarily lost the use of their landline and/or broadband due to copper theft with 153km of cable stolen in that time (April 2024 to April 2026) – spanning almost the same distance as from London to Bristol.

However, the criminals are also coming under pressure from a rise in the number of arrests (examples here and here), which are often followed by some convictions (example). Openreach also reported a 30% reduction in cable theft during 2023/24 after introducing a new forensic liquid marker (SelectaDNA) to help track and protect their network (here), although it doesn’t cover older cables that are already in the ground.

Openreach has also recently partnered with EMR, a global leader in metal recycling, to help combat copper telecoms cable theft, not least through the deployment of new signage across all UK sites and reinforcing their policy to refuse any material suspected of being stolen (here).

The ongoing deployment of Full Fibre (FTTP) broadband should, eventually, resolve the core problem as optical fibre has no value to thieves. But this won’t happen for a while because fibre and copper cables often share some of the same ducts (i.e. damaging one also damages the other), and thieves sometimes still confuse the two. Completely removing core copper cables will take a fair few years.

Openreach has a partnership with Crimestoppers, which sometimes offers rewards for information given anonymously to the charity about cable thefts, if it leads to the arrest and conviction of those responsible – you can contact them 100% anonymously on 0800 555 111 or use their anonymous online form. You can also contact Openreach’s security team direct or report via the local police (101). But if you see a crime in progress, please call the police on 999.