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Hundreds of customers on Netomnia’s (Substantial Group) alternative broadband network in the Bristol (South West England) area, which has now covered 2.8 million UK premises RFS (inc. 400,000 customers) with their full fibre (FTTP) lines, are suffering connectivity problems after Openreach “took down one of our main cables” yesterday afternoon.
According to a brief service status update, which was posted to the website of their main ISP, YouFibre: “We are currently experiencing issues in the Filton area. If you are in the area and you are experiencing issues, please rest assured that we are already working hard to resolve the issues. Thank you for your patience.”
Filton is a town about 6 miles north of Bristol on one of Netomnia’s main fibre links into the city. Details of the outage remain unclear, although Netomnia’s CEO, Jeremy Chelot, this morning stated via X that Openreach’s engineers were to blame: “Sorry Bristol, Openreach took down one of our main cables yesterday evening! We have c.500 customers impacted!”
The latest update a few minutes ago indicates that the number of customers still offline is around 200-300. ISPreview understands that the accident occurred at around 5pm yesterday, while Openreach’s engineers were working to pull a new sub duct, albeit breaking Netomnia’s duct/cable at the same time. Repairs to main fibre links can be complex and time-consuming, although Netomnia hope to have it fixed by tonight.
Sadly, such accidents, while rare, do occasionally occur when network operators need to work in close proximity to each other’s infrastructure (Netomnia runs a lot of their fibre via Openreach’s existing cable ducts and poles). Thankfully, this outage only impacts part of Netomnia’s network in the Bristol area. The operator has invested £47.7m to deploy their fibre across 159,000 premises in the area.