New Maden outage
 

No broadband service today

After talking to business faults it seems they have suffered a fibre break caused by a 3rd party contractor in the New Malden area. This is affecting service in New Malden, Croydon, Morden and surrounding areas - which have suffered a complete outage as a result.

Re: New Maden outage
 

They’ve hit 9no. Trunk fibre cables including 3x160F and 2x240F Cables.

It’ll be back up today.

Re: New Maden outage
 

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/106004...o-fix-problem/

It does get to me when people accuse VM of not bothering to fix stuff like this speedily enough. This would be classed as a major service outage, and it would be a case of all hands on deck. I’ve been on these types of fault, starting work in the morning, the fault comes in the afternoon. All hands on deck diagnosing, then when it gets to the stage the splicers are in place, a few VM engineers on site co-ordinating, then going home. Then getting there first thing the next morning to take over from someone that’s been there all night. There are so many reasons for a delay, blocked ducting so unable to pull a new fibre in. This states it was on a construction site which could have been locked. I’ve known of an underground electrical fire melt the fibres, which is difficult when you’re driving around expecting an excavation with damaged fibres in the middle. Every company has its flaws, but in this situation VM throw everything at it to get the fault done. Staff under no obligation to be in work at 2am to get stuff done as quickly as possible, the engineers want to get this sort of issue resolved ASAP

Re: New Maden outage
 

Agreed - this is completely outside VMs control. These things happen. Got to have a thought for the engineers working outside through the night in the weather we've had recently.

Still off at the moment. I am sure they are working as hard as they can to restore service.

Re: New Maden outage
 

Sadly not - now saying 2 more days.....

Re: New Maden outage
 

Bear in mind it takes 2men around 14 hrs to splice in a 240F and that’s only after the damaged cable has been removed and a new cable installed. Also there’s only so many splicers available and they can’t work round the clock.

Re: New Maden outage
 

Just look at the picture in the article. It's a lot more than a simple cut.:shocked:

Re: New Maden outage
 

Looking at the last update, possibly yes. They’re abut 2/3rds through

Re: New Maden outage
 

Service is connected again in the SM4 area. Upstream seems reasonable. However downstream SNR is between 26-27 dBmV on all 24 channels and getting 0.06 Mb/s at the moment.

Can't rely on the status page as it changed to no known problems yesterday evening when they was still not service at all. So the fact that still says no known problems isn't reliable.

I'd have expected that once fibre splicing is done for the trunks serving this area it would either work well or not - would this indicate a poor splice or could ongoing work there still affect local SNR?

Re: New Maden outage
 

Yea, a poor splice could cause the levels/snr to drop. Or it could be a bend or something on the fibre when it was put back into the tray. Splicing machines are pretty good at detecting bad splices, and they normally reject the splice request. But that said they aren’t 100%. Could also be something completely unrelated!

Re: New Maden outage
 

I remember something similar happening to Openreach in the Ealing area IIRC. A third party contractor for Railtrack had ripped through more than one duct causing a wide outage. That took about 5 days to resolve not helped by ducts travelling under the railway lines.

BT and Openreach were slagged off for the time it took. Sometimes customers just don't realise know much work and time some repairs take especially whencaused by a third party.

Re: New Maden outage
 

Completely agree - the work to repair such damage is signifcant.

I see the post on the VM Community page says it is now fixed for all areas. However not the case - SM4 is still down - such poor SNR that hardly any traffic will pass. Estimate fix tiome of 00:20 on 24th

Re: New Maden outage
 

Hopefully only a few hours then.

Re: New Maden outage
 

The ticket says it is now fixed for all residential customers, but some business circuits are still to be restored.

Re: New Maden outage
 

Business circuits int his instance will mean dedicated fibre business services. Business broadband is over the very same network as residential