Hundreds of homes were left without the internet after thieves tried to make off with valuable copper cables earlier this week.<\/p>\n
Villagers in North and South Luffenham, Edith Weston and Normanton were among those affected by the outage.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe use Wi-Fi calling because of poor signal,\u201d Coun Tim Smith said. \u201cIt went off at around 4 o’clock on Monday morning.<\/p>\n
Photo: iStock<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not sure exactly when it came back on, but it was on when I tried it this morning [Wednesday, September 17].\u201d<\/p>\n
A statement from Openreach said: \u201cWe\u2019re deeply disappointed that this community is suffering the consequences of a criminal act targeting our network.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwo underground cables more than one kilometre long were deliberately damaged and need to be replaced.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome services have now been restored, and our engineers are continuing work to get everyone back up and running as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n
\u201cEmergency traffic management is in place to ensure their safety while they work.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese attacks cause extensive disruption to local lives, threaten the safety of vulnerable individuals, and result in significant inconvenience for residents and businesses.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe urge people to call 101 to report any suspicious activity around our network to the police; if members of the public do believe a crime is in progress, then they should dial 999.\u201d<\/p>\n
A similar crime in Greatford left people in the Baston area, near Bourne, without phone or internet this month.<\/p>\n
Openreach say they have cut thefts on their network by a third after coating their cables in a synthetic DNA forensic marker that leaves unique traces on the skin and clothing of would-be thieves.<\/p>\n
However, the technology hasn\u2019t completely stopped criminals attempting to steal copper cables from remote exchange boxes or from beneath manhole covers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hundreds of homes were left without the internet after thieves tried to make off with valuable copper cables…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":150940,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[64,63,99,6016,48,20049,237,101301,58294,101302,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-150939","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-internet","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-consumer","12":"tag-crime","13":"tag-human-interest","14":"tag-internet","15":"tag-oakham","16":"tag-quirky","17":"tag-rutland-homepage","18":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150939\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}