Cable break cost likely to top £750,000

Wednesday 07 December 2016

Engineers have now reconnected one of the submarine telecoms cables which were severed by a ship dragging its anchor in the channel.

It happened at the beginning of last week, and since then specialist engineers have been working to repair the cables which carry telecoms services such as phones calls and internet links between Jersey and the rest of the world.

The serious issue has affected both Sure and JT, with three of the cables used by JT being cut, meaning it had to rely on sharing connections with Sure, and on its remaining cable link to France. 

This morning Daragh McDermott, Director of Corporate Affairs for JT, estimated the total cost of repairing each cable would be £250,000, with BT taking the lead on investigating which ship was responsible:

“We are now working with BT and Sure to bring the cable back into service. We completed splicing (joining) the fibres in the submarine cable this afternoon and we are now carefully bringing the cable back online, thereby increasing the levels of resilience we provide.

“The CS Wave Sentinel is moving on to repair the damage to one of the two remaining cables, located some 100 km away. A second cable ship, Pierre de Fermat, has already started to repair the final damaged cable. We expect all the work to be completed by early next week, with further resilience and capacity restored at that point. 

 “We were able to move quickly to address this unprecedented issue and keep disruption to an largely unnoticeable, absolute minimum. Many people have been involved in keeping the islands connected but I would especially like to thank the engineering teams in Sure and JT for their hard work during this extremely challenging period, and our customers for their understanding.”