Neighbours just cut though our business phone lines!

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2 Nov 2007
Posts
488
Hi,

Bit of an urgent situation unfolding here. We have 2 phone lines for our home business, one for phone/Internet and another for fax. At about 12 today we lost Internet connection, phone lines dead. Upon investigating we saw next door digging a trench, and a thick cable cut in two!

We have line rental with a third party and called them. They have logged the issue with bt openreach, but the guy said I would be lucky to get an engineeer out on Monday earliest! We need these lines up or we loose
money.

There were a load of gold looking cables severed so I don't think it's just going to be us affected. What should we do? How do we resolve this asap?

Really appreciate some advice (especially from any bt/telephone engineers)

cheers
 
if its a 20-50pr (or bigger) cable I can guarantee someone will be out sharpish, these sort of jobs get issued as a damage report and usually get attended fairly swiftly.... dont quote me on this tho lol
 
Get your line provider to put a divert to a mobile (or another number) in place. We often do this for our customers during an outage.
 
Thanks for the replies.

G1BB0 - I'm a bit of a novice in this field. What does 20-50pr mean?

BlueMHZ - Yes the trench and cable is on their property. It seemed very odd to me that the cable was barely a foot below the groud. Surely it should be burried deeper?

Cheers

EDIT: Thanks for the suggestion but I've already requested call forwarding to a mobile, but it doesn't seem to be active yet.
 
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Thanks for the speedy replies... Trying to keep up with you from my iPhone!

From a quick glance at the cable I rekon there was easily 20, definately more like 50 in there. The main surrounding cable itself was about 30-50mm in diameter.
 
thing is if it is buried cable it should have been armoured, if its black plastic coated then that is ducted (or should be) nice bill on the way if it is ducted as that requires contractors to repair the ducting etc

any sign of any engineers yet? not sure how long it takes from reporting to service provider and swinging over to openreach.... sometimes takes 24-48hrs to move to openreach from sp
 
As said above getting call diverted turned on is the first thing to get sorted but you've already sorted that!.

I'd have though if it's 20-50lines they would be out within 24hrs.
 
Hooray! We are back online!

I am seriously impressed by the service received from BT OpenReach.

From our logs, we lost connection at: 23rd Jan 10, 11:37
and are back up and running as of: 23rd Jan 10, 23:24

Under 12 hours on a Saturday.

I shudder to think of the bill going my neighbours way, but for that sort of service someone is going to have to pay for it.

Cheers for the help and a massive thumbs up to BT.
 
why would the neighbours get a bill if its on their property?

surely its bt's fault for not burying it very deep and not sticking the cables through a solid plastic tube or some such
 
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