Plusnet Service

Our reporting has shown a number of customer connections have been dropped, this appears to be due to a major cable fault in Ilford.

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There has been a major cable fault in the Ilford area that has caused a few thousand customers to be disconnected and re-connected on other pipes.

BT have engineers working on the problem but they do not know when this will be fixed as of yet.

We have received the following update from Openreach regarding the damaged fibre in East London. The gateway known as PTN-AG1 is affected by this fibre break and as such we are currently operating with a reduced capacity. As the network gets busier this evening some customers may see slower than normal speeds. We have also received reports of speed and connection problems on our 21CN network being caused by this outage:

Serious Incident Briefing

Serious cable damage incident in East London


Issue No. 1 Issued on: 05/04/2009

Reason For SI (SI Criteria): Serious cable damage incident in East London



This briefing on a cable damage incident in East London is for all Communications Providers.
Openreach can confirm that, following significant damage, by a third party, to cables in a deep underground tunnel on the afternoon of Saturday 4th April, a large number of end users in parts of East London are currently experiencing a loss of service.

A third party contractor has caused significant damage to one of our deep underground tunnels resulting in the loss of service to a large number of end users in parts of East London.

Due to the nature of the damage, which happened 32 meters below street level, and the restricted access to the site, it is not possible at this stage to provide an exact timeframe as to when service will be restored to all customers.

Because of the severity of the damage, the tunnel is completely blocked and to restore the cables they will need to be brought up to the surface either side of the tunnel and then routed over land through existing and new duct. The new duct is being built today as we gain permission to close roads and do the necessary work.

As a consequence of this large scale operation it may be some days before we see all services fully restored.

Openreach engineers are working extremely hard to resolve this situation and we have already successfully restored service to a number or affected end users in the early hours of Sunday morning using alternative methods of connection.

We would like to apologise to all impacted customers.

Further updates will be sent as the situation changes