Scottish rats scoff optic fibre, take down broadband

[idaho]

Two-day Virgin Media outage caused by rodents

Posted in Networks, 12th October 2011 16:01 GM

Strong-jawed rats brought down broadband services in the east of Scotland this week by chewing through fibre optic cables, Virgin Media told The Reg today in a statement.

Virgin Media phone, television and broadband customers in the Kirkcaldy, Glenrothes and Leven areas suffered outages and intermitent coverage for a period of two days between Monday morning and Tuesday evening.

Fife Council was one of the customers affected, according to a tweet, with phone lines down for much of Monday.

Virgin Media engineers called out to fix the problem soon realised that small mammals were to blame.

“The loss of service was due to rodent damage to some underground cabling,” the Virgin Media spokesman explained. “On Monday morning our engineers were on site as soon as possible and worked at the highest priority to repair the damage, with service restored early evening on Monday.”

After the fix on Monday though, it seems that the rats, unable to resist the bundles of flexible glass fibres, went back for second helpings. Virgin Media reported:

Further damage was incurred on Tuesday afternoon and our engineers returned to repair the damage. We've now put additional measures in place to prevent further damage to our cables.

We hope the "additional measures" offer some more serious resistance to those rat incisors, capable, according to the Rat and Mouse Gazette, of bite loads of more than 10 pounds.

Virgin Media confirmed that all services have now resumed and apologised to customers for the inconvenience.

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/12/dirty_rat_downs_virgin/

[Bearcat]

After the first time, they should have put out some poison for the vermin. A few less rats in this world wouldn't hurt my feelings a bit!

[JayCub]

After the first time, they should have put out some poison for the vermin. A few less rats in this world wouldn't hurt my feelings a bit!

i think he meant real rats but i know what you mean Bear they are vermin, some of the stories i have heard about them are unreal, i remember walking home one night and saw a big rat in the middle of the road and i thought this thing will run the nearer i got ..... i was almost ontop of the rat before it walked away, we don't see many but quite a few in the capital the four legged and two legged kind..

[BigGuy]

Hi Jay. I think Uncle Bear meant poisoning "real rats". I know how much he hates them. He told me the story of how a rat started chewing on my great grandpa's face, while he was sleeping on a ship carrying troops overseas in World War II.

[Bearcat]

BigGuy is right Jay, I did mean real rats. We use to go out to the city dump and shoot them when I was a kid.

@ BigGuy So you remember that story, do you? I couldn't go to sleep for days after the first time I heard it!

[JayCub]

i know my friends i was just kidding, we don't see rats that often thankfully and that sounds a truly awful story BigGuy, not a creature i would like to have around me...

My father told me quite a few stories about rats as he was laying cables for sub-stations for ICI only a handfull of men would take the job on....