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Customers of alternative UK broadband ISP Gigaclear, specifically those who take their full fibre (FTTP) network in the Northamptonshire (England) village of Brixworth South, have been impacted by a complex network outage since Sunday. This occurred after a car discovered a novel approach to parking by wiping out one of the operator’s street cabinets.
The incident, which started just after midnight on Sunday morning (30th March), appears to have disrupted broadband connectivity to a significant part of the village. As can be seen from the image attached to this article (posted with permission from local resident Nick Wilson), Gigaclear’s Street Cabinet suffered serious damage and must now be completely replaced.
Engineering work like this can be extremely complex and often results in several days of local service disruption. The physical cabinet itself was actually replaced on Monday, but the work to restore and splice new fibre cables is currently still ongoing. Thankfully, Gigaclear have been doing a reasonably good job of keeping local customers informed via their service status page.
According to Nick, Gigaclear has even been making personal calls to impacted residents and offering an additional month’s service for free in the process, which goes above and beyond what we normally see from most other ISPs. The hope is that the first customers should be back online today, and they’re said to be aiming to get everybody else reconnected by tomorrow evening. We’ve reached out to Gigaclear for a comment.