Some 11 homes along Heggatt Street in a rural Norfolk (England) community, outside Horstead, have been left without broadband access since 30th July, which began after unspecified damage was caused to Openreach’s (BT) network in the area. Some residents have been forced to drive out of the area just to find adequate connectivity.

Openreach has not said precisely what caused the network damage, although the work will apparently require the replacement of 3 telecoms poles and related wiring. Replacing poles shouldn’t normally take this long, although it’s worth noting that the incident did happen slap bang in the middle of a major national strike (here) and is near to the local gas mains.

A quick look at the local area shows that gas provider Cadent began repair and maintenance work a little further away, down Mill Road, on 17th August and this is due to complete tomorrow. Openreach started work yesterday, in the same location, and they’re also expected to finish tomorrow.

A Spokesperson for Openreach said (North Norfolk News):

“The safety of our engineers is our top priority so they’ll be guided by the gas company as to when it’s safe for them to stand the new poles and connect everyone back up again.

We’re really sorry for the disruption, and appreciate it’s been a difficult few weeks without broadband for those living nearby.

We’re doing all we can to get everyone re-connected as quickly as possible this week.”

By the sound of it, Openreach has been held up by the gas repairs In addition, we note that some mobile operators appear to have 4G (mobile broadband) coverage in the area, although there are a lot of trees around and so the reality on the ground may be more challenging.

It’s BT, why anyone surprised?

Took 22 engineers originally to finally replace cable overheads when on ADSL back in 2018 (as no FTTC) and they still couldn’t fix why rain and wind stopped the service. Thankfully, due to BDUK funds, the area not far from a city, got FTTP. Never looked back since.

As Mark reports, Openreach have been put on hold by the gas company working in the area preventing access to install the new poles required. I don’t see how we can blame Openreach for this. We absolutely would and should blame them if they charged in, ignored the gas company and endangered the lives of their engineers.

Not surprised by your comment about Openreach. In our case, it was over 20 engineers to *unofficially* admit it was their network to blame for our problems. Openreach are like a sect. I’m afraid I have zero respect for this company’s engineers as all they do is tell lies etc. etc.

ah yes, missed the “gas” bit… me skim reading. Fair enough in this case.

I’ve seen Cadent digging the hole and then leave it for two weeks as is blocking one lane on the local road.

I’m aware of a similar sized issue happening earlier this year in the Lewisham area, where another utility dig damaged the Openreach lines, disabling completely a handful of houses for phone and internet.

Said other utility also put a concrete cap on top of their work immediately after the damage, making it difficult for Openreach to make their repairs.

Affected households were given a repair time of months because the utility and openreach works would need to be opened and closed again.

After the intercession of the local MP, BT eventually funded mobile phones and 4G broadband for all the affected households, but this was not initially offered

I had all the above info direct from a friend, who was one of the households impacted.

Clearly in this case in Norfolk BT should be supporting the affected households with mobile alternatives, assuming the signal (with some network if not EE) is good enough in the area (and including mobile repeaters and external antenna as needed). The residents in Norfolk need to complain more loudly and not just work around the problem by travelling.

Why should BT do that ? BT is an ISP that would have provided 4G dongles to their customers during this. Openreach however isn’t an ISP and as access to the site has been prevented it’s not their fault that they haven’t fixed it in a suitable time frame.

Not sure how this is news, it’s happening all the time in various villages.

We had overhead FTTP installed 3 years ago and so far its been down: 3 months when someone cut it while pinching the copper. 2 months when a tree took the line down

The copper cable is still strung up in the hedge, and on the floor in a field entrance, since the last outage in March but no-one seems to want to know!

A temporary solution could have been found but it depends on the ability and want of the engineer. If a strategic customer was down I expect that would have been restored all be it temporary very quickly.

Lucky they’re aloud any broadband connection. We have FTTP FITTED back in 2018 and Openreach broadband team won’t support us having any Broadband connection at all. So at least they will get it back.

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