Thousands of Nottinghamshire homes and businesses without internet after cables damaged in theft

Openreach vans outside the Arkwright telephone exchange in the Meadows following Monday's outage.
By Callum Wright

Thousands of Nottinghamshire homes and businesses have been left  without internet and phone services after cables were damaged in an apparent theft.

Network company Openreach says it is now working to replace about 700m of cabling after “malicious damage” at a site in Nottingham which has had a knock-on effect in the West Bridgford and Rushcliffe area.

Beginning on Sunday morning, people living in West Bridgford, Radcliffe-on-Trent, Bingham and surrounding villages began reporting phone and broadband had dropped out.

Businesses are also affected, with many in the areas unable to take contactless payments and local cash machines running low as a result.

On Monday, (October 14) Openreach, which runs large parts of the national internet network infrastructure, said engineers are working to replace the cables as “quickly and safely as they can”, but the work is expected to take around 48 hours before anyone affected has their services restored.

An Openreach spokesperson said: “We’re really disappointed that people living and working here are bearing the brunt of criminal behaviour and theft from our network.

“These attacks cause significant damage and unacceptable disruption to the lives of local people and put vulnerable people at risk.”

The added about 10,000 properties had been by the outage, and the cable cut happened close to the Arkwright exchange, which is near Trent Bridge.

Bingham, Cotgrave, Long Bennington, Leabrooks, Radcliffe on Trent, Whatton, Waltham-on-the-Wolds, Clitheroe, Withdean and Verwood have been listed by the company as the areas which may be affected.

West Bridgford and the Meadows have also had problems. The outage is believed to affect a number of internet providers, while others including Virgin Media fibre customers unaffected.

Many of the properties hit by the outage have been small businesses who have lost card machines and ordering services.

Alex Beiscak, of DIY store Handicentre in Bingham, said: “We’ve not accessed internet on our computer; we can’t order anything in or any stock.”

Charlotte Meyler, from florist Zinnia Floral also in Bingham, said there has been a “loss of business” and staff have had to “hotspot off phones and have calls directed to mobile”.

A member of staff at the Radcliffe pub, in Radcliff-on-Trent, said: “We haven’t had internet since yesterday (Sunday 13th) morning; we haven’t been able to access any of our emails.”

Openreach added: “We urge people to call 101 to report any suspicious activity around our network to the Police; if members of the public do believe a crime is in progress then they should dial 999.”