Original article ISPreview UK:Read More
A number of homes, businesses and several network operators, including Netomnia (Youfibre, Brsk) and Openreach (BT), were impacted yesterday outside the City of Durham after vandals gained access to a chamber and cut vital fibre optic cables; disrupting local broadband connectivity for a protracted period.
The incident appears to have occurred sometime during the small hours of Wednesday (1st Oct) morning, around the junction of Littletown Lane and Coalford Lane in County Durham. Netomnia later issued an update (here) to confirm that their engineers would be working on the issue through the night, which had been identified as “an act of vandalism on the network, and our fibre cables have been cut … We’re working closely with the security team at [Openreach] to determine how this occurred“.
The good news this morning, which was confirmed just a few short minutes before we posted this article, is that “the unplanned outage in these locations is now resolved“. Netomnia are now advising customers who may still be experiencing issues to “please power off and back on your ONT (the small box on your wall) and your router“.
Regular ISPreview readers will already be aware that, over the past few years, there has been somewhat of an increase in physical attacks against UK broadband and mobile networks (examples here, here, here and here), as well as the engineers responsible for building and maintaining them. Such attacks don’t just cause costly physical damage but can also leave local homes and businesses disconnected, often for a protracted period, from vital communication services.
Quite why people do this isn’t always clear. Most such criminal incidents are often considered to be vandalism, although in some cases this can relate to the theft of valuable network equipment (e.g. batteries or old copper telecoms cables), attempts to disrupt security systems at a specific site (usually pointless due to 4G/5G backups), revenge by disgruntled former employees / rivals or may even form part of a poorly conceived protest.
Such networks are typically considered to be part of Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) and damaging them is thus a serious criminal offence, which has in the past caused some people to face prison sentences. But the existing rules and punishments don’t always seem to be acting as enough of a deterrent, and the industry has previously called for changes (here).