Fibre-optic cable cut takes out broadband and Vodafone mobile service around Rodney

Broadband and Vodafone mobile phone customers have experienced service disruptions. Photo / File

Broadband and Vodafone mobile phone customers in many areas of Rodney District have experienced service disruptions for two days after a Chorus fibre-optic cable was cut.

According to a Chorus outage notification sighted by the Herald, the fibre-optic cable was severed approximately at 1pm on Tuesday between Warkworth and Puhoi.

This caused intermittent loss of broadband services in Mahurangi, Matakana, Red Beach and Warkworth, as well as Chorus Regional Transport Services data circuit and Intra-Candidate Area Backhaul (ICAB) Services, used for UFB connectivity between exchanges.

At the same time, mobile 2G, 3G, and 4G coverage to 13 sites in Rodney District was degraded after the fibre-optic cable was cut and the problems continued into Wednesday.

Customers in Omaha, Puhoi Straights, Wellsford South, Kawau Island, Ahuroa, Snells Beach, Matakana, Great Barrier Island, Warkworth, Kraacks Rd, and Leigh were impacted by the outage.

Matakana resident Nigel Parker said that his area and Point Wells lost fibre internet connectivity early on Tuesday afternoon.

Parker, who occasionally works from home, uses Vodafone's 4G service as a backup for when his UFB fibre connection is disrupted, but to his surprise mobile service in the area was down too.

This included both voice and data, and Parker questioned why neither his internet provider, BigPipe, nor Vodafone acknowledged the outage on their status pages and provided updates to customers.

With @vodafoneNZ and @BigPipeNZ being offline for hours today North of Warkworth due to a downstream @ChorusNZ fault. I went out & purchased my own redundancy on @SparkNZ https://t.co/rQeWjVDM60

— Nigel 🥑🍺🏃 (@nzigel) November 20, 2018

Parker also asked why Vodafone does not appear to have any redundancy (backup circuits in case their main ones fail) in their network to Warkworth, whereas competitor Spark has.

"In frustration I drove 30 minutes this morning to the closest Spark store to purchase a prepay SIM card with 8GB of data, 500 mins of calls and unlimited NZ texts for $55.

"I felt I needed to build a redundancy plan for myself given my telco provider didn't seem to have one," Parker said

He took to social media to vent his frustration with Vodafone after being unable to make calls today thanks to intermittent service disruptions.

A Vodafone spokesperson confirmed that the fibre cut was causing an intermittent impact to the telco's sites in the area, and added that there was an unspecified equipment issue in Chorus' as well.

"We have been working with the Vendor to resolve this as it seems there is a hardware issue on their network as well affecting the redundant path which became apparent after the initial impact," the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson did not say how many customers were affected by the outage.

Vodafone hopes to have services stabilised by today.

Chorus said it has repaired the cable breakage as of noon Wednesday.