Welwyn Hatfield is experiencing widespread phone and internet problems
Cable theft responsible for Welwyn Hatfield internet and telephone problems
By Ross Logan , Reporter
Friday, February 10, 2012
11:56 AM
AN attempted cable theft is being blamed for the widespread telephone and internet connection problems in Welwyn Hatfield today.
Large areas of the borough remain without telephone and broadband services, as engineers attempt to fix the problem.
In the last half hour, BT has reported it has fixed its telephone services, but broadband users are still affected.
The company says damaged cables has been the primary cause of the outage.
A BT spokesman told the Welwyn Hatfield Times: “We have suffered cuts to underground cabling in an apparent attempted cable theft which is affecting some services in the area at the moment.
“Engineers have been onsite and urgently working in very difficult conditions to assess the damage and to start to work on repairs.
“We are doing all we can to get this work completed to start to restore service as quickly as we possibly can.”
Sky is also reporting an exchange outage in WGC, Hatfield and Knebworth, and is still working to resolve the issue.
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12 comments
@ Bill Hodgson "How is it that the Welhat times can update their website from their WGC offices when there's no Internet?" Quite easy if they use 3G mobile phones!
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IJWilliams
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Maybe you meant currant?
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Bill Hodgson
Saturday, February 11, 2012
I live in Stevenage and I lost my Sky phone and Broadband Thursday 9th Feb at 19.30 and did not get it back until Saturday Morning due to the fault in Hatfield.
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Robert
Saturday, February 11, 2012
If the Government banned cash sales from scrapyards and introduced a system where only registered companies could sell scrap. Metal theft would stop overnight. But since we have a bunch of incompetent Muppets in charge nothing will happen.
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Nutty
Friday, February 10, 2012
oops current sb different
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Michael doney
Friday, February 10, 2012
@bill hodgson Business broadband goes down a current line as business need guaranteed bandwidth and service uptime. They have to pay a lot more for it.
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Michael doney
Friday, February 10, 2012
How is it that the Welhat times can update their website from their WGC offices when there's no Internet? ;-)
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Bill Hodgson
Friday, February 10, 2012
This is what I've heard: "Five cables damaged by "malicious action" affecting both 20CN and 21CN services. No further updates expected until this evening, with tomorrow as a likely fix date." Can't vouch for accuracy though.
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woolmergreen
Friday, February 10, 2012
In response to previous comments, redundancy is built into most systems to cover normal failure modes however it cannot take account of some mindless idiot stealing sections of the cables. The railways and electricity companies also have the same problem and even the fact that some of their cables are carrying potentially lethal voltages does not seem to deter the thieves. The majority of the Virginmedia network is fibre optic cable which has zero scrap value campared to copper or aluminium cable so if anyone tries to steal that they are wasting their time!
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CJF - Hatfield
Friday, February 10, 2012
WGCRV... Virgin Media customers may not have been affected by cable theft, but their prices are going up, well, mine are anyway... I call that 'Theft'.
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commonsense
Friday, February 10, 2012
Good to see that Virgin Media customers aren't affected
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WGCRV
Friday, February 10, 2012
It just goes to show that there is no redundancy at all in the underlying network given they are prone to a single points of failure like this. Outrageous from a monopoly Telco that charges service providers the earth.
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woolmergreen
Friday, February 10, 2012