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Apparently the odd squirrel in Manchester (England) has developed a taste for Netomnia’s optical fibre network after one of them went nuts while taking a mega-bite out of the network operator’s overhead broadband cable in the city, which caused a brief case of nut-working failure for at least one or two of their customers.
Over the years we’ve reported on lots of animal and insect related damage occurring on the UK’s many fixed broadband and mobile networks. From swarms of bees or wasps occupying cabinets (here), to badgers blocking access to cable ducts, spiders decorating the inside of connection boxes with dense webs (here), and rodents (rats and dormice) frequently chewing through vital fibre optic and copper cables (here and here).
Suffice to say that being a telecoms engineer today requires a degree of personal fortitude in more ways than one, not least because you never quite know what sort of wildlife is going to pop out at you from the local network infrastructure from one day to the next. In this case the guilty squirrel is understood to have left the scene before engineers arrived to investigate, but thankfully the connection has since been restored.