Copper Thieves Disrupt Local Broadband Services
Thousands of Sky customers in Chiswick affected
|
Over 3,000 Sky Broadband and Talk customers in Chiswick are amongst 10,000 people without access to the internet or phone lines for several days. This follows damage to fibre optic cables at a BT site on the Great West Road, caused by thieves looking for copper to steal.
Customers in Chiswick have complained of being without service since last Tuesday and of a lack of up to date information from Sky. Many are finding it difficult to get through to Sky for information. At the moment it is expected that Chiswick may have service restored today but that cannot be confirmed.
The Sky website says today ( Dec 13) that BT Openreach engineers have managed to restore service in Stamford Hill and Ewell and are "working hard to resolve the outage still affecting 3,000 Sky customers in Chiswick".
"The outage occurred after fibre cables were cut by thieves attempting to steal copper from a site in West London (Great West Road) on 10 December. Openreach have estimated that the remaining work should be completed later today (13 December). Please note, your broadband speeds may be slower than usual in the recently restored areas while the network resumes full service. We will keep you informed with any updates as soon as we receive them and are sorry for any inconvenience caused."
The damage was discovered by BT Open Reach engineers when they investigated the outage which also affected areas of Stamford Hill, Mitcham, Wimbledon, Battersea, Chiswick and Dartford.
BT said that its network had suffered "malicious cable damage" and added that Openreach engineers were working hard to restore the service as quickly as possible.
December 13, 2013
