Well over a thousand Perthshire residents found their internet connections were down when a digger accidentally cut a cable during roadworks at Ballinluig.
A major service outage meant for many, the broadband service to homes and businesses disappeared at 10.30pm on Tuesday night and was still off all of the next day.
Aberfeldy ’s health centre could not take direct calls on Wednesday, and Breadalbane Academy’s switchboard was putting calls direct to a recorded message while Live Active Leisure’s community campus line was unobtainable.
Openreach gave a figure of 1300 customers in Strathtay, Aberfeldy, Kenmore, Ballinluig and Pitlochry areas being affected on Wednesday and emphasised that it would be “painstaking” work to reconnect the thousands of individual strands in the fibre cable that had been damaged.
An Openreach spokesperson said: “Engineers are working to restore services following damage to a major fibre cable during third-party excavations on an A9 flyover at Ballinluig yesterday (Tuesday 19) afternoon.
“The damage is affecting broadband services in the Strathtay, Aberfeldy, Kenmore, Ballinluig and Pitlochry areas.
“Work on repairs has been ongoing around the clock and a replacement cable has been laid, with work about to start on reconnecting hundreds of individual fibres.
“It’s a complex task and engineers are working to get everyone reconnected as quickly as possible.
“People will start seeing services restored this afternoon but we expect work will be ongoing into the night.
“We’re very sorry for the unexpected disruption to service meantime.”
The spokesperson explained that fibre is generally more “robust” than the old copper cables of the past, but when a fibre cable was severed as in this case, it was very specialist - and slow - work to make the tiny repairs within the bundle of fibres that make up the main cable.
Openreach is the main provider of digital connection in Scotland, with multiple different companies - TalkTalk, Vodafone, SSE and not just BT Broadband - using their fibre service.
