BT home phone outage hits Chichester

BT customers on one Chichester street have been without broadband access for over a fortnight after their phone lines were cut off.

According to the Chichester Observer, at least 30 houses on Orchard Street have lost access to their home phone.

BT blamed the incident on a "third party" damaging cabling and said it hoped to fix the problem on Monday (August 6th 2012), but council spokesman Jeremy Dunning stated the damage should not have been caused by resurfacing roadworks recently completed in the area.

"We skimmed off the top of the road to a depth of about 450 mm and replaced that," he remarked, adding cables "should have been at a greater depth than that".

Resident Marie Hurst said BT and local authorities have been unable to provide a "reasonable explanation" for the outage, adding she is unhappy at being forced to spend "a fortune" making calls using a mobile phone.

It is the latest phone line outage BT has had to deal with, as in May this year as many as 20,000 residents across Eastbourne and Brighton lost connections for around six hours, with hospitals, schools and businesses among those to suffer.