Original article ISPreview UK:Read More
Broadband and Ethernet customers across northern parts of Liverpool (Merseyside) – primarily the L31 (Maghull) and surrounding areas – in England are today suffering connectivity problems after a third-party contractor, which may have been working for the waterboard, dug through a large underground cable right next to the local BT Maghull exchange.
The situation appears to have started yesterday and is currently still ongoing. ISPreview contacted Openreach about the situation earlier this morning, but we have so far received no response. However, details sent to impacted communications providers do confirm a few things, such as that third-party contractors working for a utility company on a sewer excavation “damaged multiple fibre cables” near the exchange.
The resultant outage has hit both copper and fibre optic based broadband connections, as well as high-capacity Ethernet (leased line) services – the latter includes some circuits supporting Critical National Infrastructure (CNI). In total around 3,000 end customers are known to be impacted, but this is expected to rise as not everybody has reported in yet.
Engineers currently appear to be swarming the area, although complex repairs like this, which involve damage across “multiple ducts” and an “unstable” excavation side (that will have to be made safe first), will take a lot of time. Some cables also “cannot be pulled through” and will need more extensive repair.
As a result of this it’s hard to know precisely when the situation will be fully resolved and a solid fix time (estimate) may not emerge until the weekend.