03/10/2026
Almost a MONTH without broadband. In 2026. Just down the road from us in Frensham.
I read this story on ISPReview this morning and, frankly, what surprises me almost as much as the outage itself is how accepting we seem to have become of situations like this.
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2026/10/openreach-reconnect-village-after-water-leak-caused-month-long-broadband-outage.html
According to ISPReview, parts of Frensham lost broadband and phone services after a burst water pipe damaged an Openreach underground cable on 5 September. Some residents weren’t fully reconnected until 30 September.
Almost four weeks?!
The report says there were delays involving resources and traffic management, complaints about communication, and even vulnerable residents whose telecare services were affected.
I appreciate that network faults happen. We operate a broadband network ourselves, so we know better than most that cables get damaged, equipment fails and sometimes circumstances are outside an operator’s control.
But the real test of a network operator is what happens AFTER something goes wrong.
Last week, Openreach contractors cut fibres serving part of our own Grayshott network, taking several hundred of our customers offline.
We knew very quickly because our customers told us, and we had alerts on our network.
We had people on site within around half an hour.
Our engineers worked on the problem and the affected services were restored the following day.
That was one of the longest significant outages we’ve had. Most faults on our network have been resolved within hours.
Why?
Because we’re local.
We live here. We see the people affected. Our customers aren’t anonymous account numbers amongst millions of subscribers. They’re our neighbours, local businesses, families and people we bump into in the village.
This is one of the things that often gets forgotten when choosing broadband.
Of course price matters.
Speed matters.
But when everything stops working at 8pm on a wet Tuesday night, who is actually going to care enough to get it working again?
A £2 or £5 saving every month suddenly doesn’t look quite so important if you’re offline for days or weeks.
I’m genuinely surprised that a community could experience disruption on this scale and that we aren’t asking much harder questions about resilience, repair times and accountability.
Perhaps we’ve simply become too accustomed to accepting poor broadband service from very large organisations.
We shouldn’t.
Local broadband shouldn’t just mean faster broadband.
It should mean local accountability. Local engineers. Local support. And somebody who actually knows the community they’re serving.
Interested to hear from people in Frensham who were affected. What communication did you receive, and how long were you actually without service?
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