The Metropolitan Police have jailed two adult men for stealing a “large quantity” of BT’s copper telephone cable while they posed as local workmen, which resulted in a total loss of fixed line broadband ISP and phone services to hundreds of premises in Teddington and Sussex (England) during May 2012.
The Royal Wootton Bassett & Cricklade Police force in Wiltshire (England) has warned people to be on the lookout for bogus door-to-door sales representatives that attempt to sell broadband packages without giving any form of ID or saying which ISP you’d be connected to.
The battle to tackle copper cable and metal theft appears to finally be turning. BT informs ISPreview.co.uk that there was a 50% fall in incidents and a 24% reduction in faults pertaining to malicious damage of their UK phone and broadband ISP network last year.
The communications regulator has today revealed that 47% of UK internet users are unable to “confidently identify” whether the online content they download, stream or share is legal or not. Meanwhile some 16% of users aged 12+ said they had “accessed online content illegally” between May to July 2012.
The incumbent phone and broadband provider for Hull and East Yorkshire in England (UK), KC (Karoo), has joined in a local partnership with Humberside Police, Hull City Council, BT and local scrap metal merchants. The group has specifically called on members of the public to help them stop metal thieves.
BTOpenreach are offering a reward of up to £1000 for information that leads to a conviction of those responsible for cutting a vital 1000 metre long fibre optic cable (probably because they thought it was made of more valuable copper) that runs across Loch Carron in Scotland’s (UK) rural Highlands region.
BT has announced plans to deploy a new burglar alarm technology across its national UK network of copper based telephone and broadband ISP lines. The solution, called RABIT (Rapid Assessment B.T Incident Tracker), actively monitors the operators network and informs BT’s Security Control Centre when a physical disconnection (e.g. cable cut) has occurred.