Broadband ISP Exascale, which is building a gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to several thousand premises – mostly around Telford and Wrekin, has revealed that several core Dark Fibre cables – between Telford and Wolverhampton – were cut this week in what appears to have been a targeted attack by vandals.
The incident appears to have started just before midnight on Sunday (28th April 2024) in Wolverhampton and is understood to have affected other network operators too (networks sometimes share ducts or wavelengths on the same cables). By 2am on Monday, it was clear that vandals had “cut a number of fibre cables on the entry into our Wolverhampton point of presence” and third-party contractors were promptly engaged to pull in 70 metres of new cables and splice them back together.
After finding further damage during the repair work (ISPreview understands that 8 of Exascale’s fibres ended up needing repairs), the incident was finally declared resolved just before 4pm on Monday. The strong suspicion is that this was a targeted attack by somebody who appeared to know the route.
Thomas Bibb, CEO of Exascale, said:
“Yesterday evening Exascale had the unfortunate experience of vandalism on one of our core high capacity links into Telford from Wolverhampton. We have lost a large number of high bandwidth optical wave lengths. The Exascale team and our layer 1 provider have been working through the night to resolve. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.”
ISPreview readers will already be aware that, over the past year, there seems to have been an increase in physical attacks against UK broadband networks. Some of the most recent examples include a “targeted attack” against Ogi’s full fibre (FTTP) network in Wales that left customers disconnected (here), as well as a similar attack against Netomnia’s (YouFibre) network in Liverpool (here) and a smaller incident against Pine Media’s network in Sheffield (here). In addition, MS3 recently had some of their poles cut down by chainsaws in East Yorkshire (here).
The situation recently prompted a group of full fibre operators, led by alternative network providers Ogi and Vorboss, to call on the UK Government and Ofcom to urgently help tackle the problem (here). In response a government spokesperson (DSIT) said that the UK has “one of the toughest telecoms security regimes in the world and we continue to work closely with relevant organisations to identify risks and ensure the security and resilience of our telecoms network infrastructure.”