New build village left without internet for days

Hundreds of houses in Longhedge Village on the edge of Salisbury have been left without internet since lunchtime on Friday (29th August 2022) following a fault with the service.

The fibre internet is provided by Open Fibre Networks Limited (OFNL) which is the exclusive network which serves the brand-new houses and business premises.

OFNL specialise in connecting new build developments across the UK with ultra-fast broadband with fibre-to-the-home solutions. The network is described as being separate from the usual OpenReach and Virgin networks.

On Friday, residents started reporting outages to their providers which include See The Light (which is owned by Sky), Rocket Fibre, V Fast and others. Most of which are not household names. Customers are unable to be provided by more well-known businesses like BT, Virgin or Talk Talk.

Residents are not alone in being affected. The Spar store and Chinese take away on the new build estate have both been hit and unable to take card payments as this relies on the internet to process.

According to one of the residents, after days of very slow updates, OFNL has now placed the fault of the outage at the door of Openreach as a third-party supplier.

Openreach workers are on strike today (Monday 1st August) as they also were on Friday (29th July) which is causing further delays to rectify the fault and more frustration for both residents and businesses.

Locals have taken to local Facebook groups to vent their annoyance at the ongoing problems.

One local business owner said, "We are a business on the industrial estate and have had to move all our computers and phones back home as we are unable to take calls etc. Definitely not impressed!!!"

Cindy Vanstone, who is a councillor for Laverstock and Ford Parish Council added a response to others, "As your local Parish Councillor, I am going to be looking into how this kind of issue could be presented in the future."

She continued, "As they are contracted to give us the service, then they should be providing it. All well and good to have time away with family, but when it is needed for work, then it becomes a big issue."

The latest update from OFNL suggests that the outage won’t be resolved until tomorrow at the earliest, leaving residents and businesses without internet or telephone services for the fourth day.

The latest update given stated, "Due to industrial action, our third-party cant gain access to the BT exchange so are unable to progress with service restoration. We are working hard with our 3rd party provider to restore service as soon as possible. With the industrial action by BT staff still ongoing today, we do not expect restoration of service until 02/08/2022 at the earliest."

Image from Bovis Homes.