Telecoms firms warn of disruption as submarine cables cut

Tuesday 29 November 2016

JT and Sure have both warned of disruption to services after a number of international submarine data cables were cut yesterday evening in an “unprecedented” accident.

It is thought that the fibre-optic cables to the UK were cut by a ship dragging its anchor along the seabed, which also cut a number of other submarine cables in its path.

All JT communication to and from the Channel Islands is now being routed via the submarine cable link with France instead – but with all traffic now using this connection, customers may notice some impact on services. It says three of its cables were cut. 

Daragh McDermott, Director of Corporate Affairs for JT, said: “We would like to sincerely apologise to our customers for any disruption to their services.

“We are working as quickly as we can to get our undersea cables repaired, and normal service resumed, and will keep customers up-to-date with what is an extremely challenging emergency engineering operation at sea.

“It is exceptionally unlucky and unprecedented for three submarine cables to the UK to be cut in the same day, and it proves the value of having multiple links in the network, in order to provide a back-up connection via France.

Eddie Saints, Chief Executive of Sure, said:

"Sure immediately assembled its incident response and support teams who quickly determined that the impact on Sure was limited to UK and international voice calls only. Sure’s internet and mobile services were not affected.

“Sure’s multi million pound investment in the HUGO subsea cable infrastructure operated without fault, demonstrating our ability to provide leading telecommunication services despite an unprecedented incident such as this.

“Our engineering teams worked through the night to put in place measures to divert our voice traffic through the HUGO network as well as to provide specialist technical support and infrastructure to JT, who had all direct UK submarine cables severed, impacting a number of JT’s services. Sure continues to support JT with re-routing their consumer and business traffic via Sure’s HUGO network.

“Sure, JT and BT in the UK are joint system owners and are working together to organise emergency repairs to the damaged undersea cables. We anticipate that the subsea infrastructure repair will take up to three weeks and we will keep customers up-to-date on progress. 

Newtel have issued a statement saying their services were not affected.