A major theft of copper telecommunications cable from telephone exchanges in the Monmouthshire and Newport areas of south east Wales (UK) has resulted in serious broadband and phone service outages.

It's understood that both BT and Virgin Media are known to have been affected by last week's criminal activity, which saw over 80 metres of cable being stolen from one of the locations. Thousands of pounds worth of damage was caused by the activity, although services are now thought to have been restored.


Expectations of high demand have caused the price of copper to spiral, hitting $9,728 a tonne in January 2011. Similarly many telecoms junctions can be accessed by brute force alone, which makes copper cable a tempting target.

BT has moved to combat the problem and last year setup its Metal Theft Taskforce (MTT), which used an invisible solution (SmartWater) to forensically "tag" metal thieves and the stolen cable (here).

The operator claims that it's MTT has since helped to arrest over 400 people whom are suspected of stealing from BT's network, although it's unclear how many of them have actually been prosecuted.

Meanwhile Fibrestream recently alleged that BT was hampering the broadband ISP performance of affected areas by replacing stolen copper cables with an inferior substitute. Naturally BT has denied the claim, though Fibrestream are still sticking to their guns (here).