Case Study 1

Rats Cause Virgin Broadband Outage In Scotland

Some Virgin Media customers in Scotland were briefly left without broadband when rats chewed cables

On October 13, 2011 by Tom Jowitt 3

Virgin Media confirmed that some customers in Scotland experienced a broadband service outage earlier this week, after rats were found to have chewed through fibre optic cables.

Speaking to eWEEK Europe, a Virgin Media spokesperson confirmed that its services went offline for a couple of hours on Monday and then again on Tuesday. “Full service was resorted on Tuesday evening and customers are no longer affected,” said the spokesperson.

Dietary Fibre?

“We’re aware that a number of customers in the Kirkcaldy, Glenrothes and Leven areas may have experienced intermittent loss of their Virgin Media services from Monday morning until Tuesday evening,” said Virgin Media in a statement."

“The loss of service was due to rodent damage to some underground cabling,” it said. “On Monday morning our engineers were on site as soon as possible and worked at the highest priority to repair the damage, with service restored early evening on Monday.”

“Further damage was incurred on Tuesday afternoon and our engineers returned to repair the damage,” said Virgin Media. “We’ve now put additional measures in place to prevent further damage to our cables to avoid further disruption for our customers. We’re extremely sorry for any inconvenience caused.”

It is thought that at least 100 customers were affected by the cable damage caused by the rat attack, which must be an inherent risk when your cabling infrastructure is based in underground ducts.

However it is worth remembering that this Virgin Media outage is nowhere near the scale of the recent outage experienced by thousands of BT customers. A major power failure at a BT exchange in Birmingham was blamed for causing connectivity problems for broadband customers across the UK.

Case Study 2

Cable service interrupted on West End by rats

molokainews | December 28, 2011 | 0 Comments

Rats chewing through Oceanic Time Warner Cable’s fiberoptic underground lines recently interrupted service for a week for about 140 customers on the West End of Molokai.

Rats enjoy eating through fiberoptic cables so much that they chewed through two different sections of underground cable on the West End.

According to Jill McGowan, West End Realtor and resident, Oceanic Cable had been giving customers the run around since Dec. 11. However, Oceanic General Manager for Maui County Rick Colletto, said service problems were first reported by customers Dec. 15 or 16.

“We have limited resources on Molokai,” said Colletto, explaining the delay in making the necessary repairs. Apparently, an Oceanic technician spliced the fibers together on Dec. 19 but the line failed again after this temporary fix.

Another Oceanic crew was dispatched from Maui on Dec. 20 and they found other areas that needed fiber splicing after rats had chewed through cables. Rat poison was placed around the new splices but service still did not work.

Colletto said this only solved the problem for about half of the customers. He said a small electronic device needed replacement and now at least 95 percent of the affected modems are working. Initially some of the modems did not accept the fixes. “We are in the midst of figuring this out ourselves,” said Colletto.

According to Colletto, a total of 140 modems in the Ke Nani Kai and Kaluakoi Villas condos were affected.

Delays with service occur on Molokai because of a lack of support staff to help the technicians on island. The number of subscribers does not justify additional support staff, said Colletto.

“We are always sorry when something like this happens and we try to make it right,” said Colletto.