Well, that was interesting ... NOT!

[Tim Streater]

We just had a 20 hour phone outage (no dial tone [1]). The whole village was off and coming back from Morrison's this a.m. there must have been 5 or 6 OpenReach vans on the road up the hill from the adjacent village. Finally back half an hour ago.

Couple of questions:

1) One of the blokes had one of those jobs with a single wheel for measuring distance. To me that smacks of using a TDR to get the distance from some known point, to a cable break, and then using the wheely job to get there. That make sense? SWMBO thought, however, that the phone cable was on poles which if true means what was the klod doing?

2) Does OpenReach have any sort of centre like the leccy people have that you can contact to ask about outages in your area? We're not with BT so I didn't even really know who to contact - not that it's easy given a PYG phone and no signal.

[1] Last time I had no-dial-tone was during the 1989 SF earthquake.

[John Williamson]

A break in the cable core may not be visible from the ground, if the insulation is still intact, and the problem may have been due to something tall snagging the cable enough to break the cores but not the strain wire or insulation before the problem was noticed. The break will probably be above a field gate.

Openreach say:-

Basically, contact your landline service provider on their fault reporting system, and they will contact Openreach.

[Nightjar]

Working out how much cable they needed to replace what had been stolen?

[Tim Streater]

In article ,

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Tim Streater escribió:

A pretty sad state of affairs when we have to alarm cable. Time to bring back more effective forms of punishment. Fuck this rehabilitation bollocks, let's bring back the lash. In public and televised.

[Dave Liquorice]

Even with the tighter rules for scrap metal dealers cable theft still happens. I suspect that a recent broadband outage that affected

01242, 01434, 01452, 01465, 01527, 01555, 01556, 01644, 01661, 01892, 019122, 019126 & 01984. (ie goodly chunk of the NE of England) was down to cable theft.

The final BT MSO is a big vauge "Service was fully restored at 18:43 following the repair of the damaged cable." but as the incident started at 0540 that's a bit early for a man with a JCB accidentaly digging into the cable...

And it doesn't take long to open up a couple of holes attach some form of cable puller to a vehicle, cut the cable and drive off, then bundle the cable into the back of a van. 5 mins? if that.

[Andy Burns]

"Nightjar

[Nightjar]

[Andy Burns]

suspect the scrotes don't try to flog it to UK scrappies, just bundle it into an ISO container and export it somewhere that doesn't care.

Yep, standard BT procedure now is to use a spare pair as a loopback to detect cut/loss.

[Tim Streater]

Yes, I'm going to have to figure out a good way to do that given a lack of landline and (next to) no mobile signal. I did try today at a spot in the house where there's *just* enough signal, but even when I explained that the whole village was cut off, they still wanted me to plug and unplug phones etc.

He did put me on hold while he checked with BT but could then give me no useful info at all. SWMBO had suggested earlier in the day on the way home that we stop and ask one of the BT guys, but I figured that if everyone did that they'd be permanently held up.

I was hoping that there'd be an openreach site where you type in a postcode and they tell you about outages in that area and possible time to fix. Perhaps they still suffer from the old nationalised industry attitude that it's no business of the consumer.

[Tim Watts]

The poles distribute to houses. They (at least round here) are fed via a bundle of cables in the road.

Out in a country lane, it might be all on the pole, if only a couple of dozen houses.

Sorry...

[Tim Watts]

Mending roads in a chain gang.

Plenty of work doing that around here and the council can't afford to do it so noone's being displaced from gainful employment...

No nancying around - rope em up in 5's, and give them a small road drill, a mattock, a spade, a barrow of hot tarmac.

Guards stand back.

If they have to square off every hole and fill it properly, the repair will last longer than the council's...

[Capitol]

I prefer hanging, no repeat offenders!

[J.B.Treadstone]

Have to agree with you on that. "Hard Labour Community Service".

[John Williamson]

Well, Openreach's consumers are the service providers, so they don't need to contact the end users according to their business model.

In a similar way, Network Rail don't contact the passengers directly, they do it through the train operating companies.

[Chris Hogg]

Would she be riding shotgun then?

[Nightjar]

That is down to the quality of service from your provider. When I lost broadband (but not phone lines) about a month ago, both of which I get from the same provider, they quickly identified my problem as part of a much larger one, affecting much of the country. They telephoned me back when BT had identified the problem (stolen cable) and emailed me when the service was up and running again.

[charles]

2 villages away they took the complete exchange (a cabinet device). An we had 3 incidents. 1. cable cut but it was left. New cable needed. 2 new cable cut but left, there was enough slack to simply remake the ends. 3. a success removal of the cable. All over about a 6 week period.

[charles]

It took them long enough to work that out. It wasn't the case 2 years ago.

[charles]

and the OpenReach people are not allowed to talk to the public (officially).