Posted: 21st Nov, 2011 By: MarkJ


Telecoms operator BT has confirmed to us that broadband and phone services in the rural village of
North Luffenham (
Leicestershire) were seriously disrupted last week after thieves stole an unspecified length of BT's vital copper cable.
The issue was spotted after ISP Rutland Telecom (
Gigaclear), which only last month completed work to bring faster internet access speeds of up to 24Mbps into the same region (
here), informed us of problems in the area.
A BT Spokeswoman told ISPreview.co.uk:
"We can confirm that a cable theft incident occurred on 17th November in North Luffenham. Services are now restored to affected customers as a result of BT engineers working around the clock to repair the cables over the weekend."
Services have now been fully restored after several days of problems and police are known to be investigating the incident. Sadly it wouldn't be the first time that North Luffenham has been targeted, with
two other similar incidents having taken place since the summer. So far it appears as if all of them have centred on cabling in the
Ketton Road area, which connects roughly 1,200 homes and businesses.
The
Local Government Association (LGA) recently called for tougher powers to tackle the problem after it revealed that some thieves were being helped by old legislation that makes it difficult to regulate the scrap metal industry.
It's worth pointing out that the
price of copper has recently begun to plummet, fuelled to some significant degree by the wider economic problems within Europe. None of this appears to deter the criminals.