Why your Business might have lost connection:)

Well guys reading this morning on Iafrica I came across this,this morning and lets just say I had to shake my head in disgust at people that take things and cause more damage than they would EVER make out of that copper they stole!

Mass phone outage due to cable theft
Posted Fri, 09 Jan 2004

Telkom technicians are working around the clock to restore 1800 communications services in Johannesburg after cable thieves broke into the underground network near Jan Smuts Avenue on Thursday and cut through four underground cables.

The thieves made off with portions of the main cables feeding Craighall, Hydepark and Dunkeld, knocking out 1800 services including about 350 business services, Telkom said in a statement overnight.

Lines affected are those starting with the prefixes 880, 882, 788, 761, 763, 760, 766.

Damages have yet to be quantified, but Telkom aims to have all services restored by late Friday afternoon, concentrating initially on the restoration of business and data lines, it said.

I-Net Bridge

Regards
Cerbrus
p.s I'm still half asleep

I am resident and work in the area affected, and this is not the first time this has happened. If I recall correctly, over the past three years this has happened at least twice, which makes it an annual occurrence. Thankfully I am not affected this time. It would be nice to know what Telkom are doing to avoid repeat occurrences - surely the cost of maintenance by now would probably be more than the cost of deploying replacement technologies (i.e. fibre/wireless)? Anybody on this forum who is in the know?

No surprises here. Happens to Spoornet as well.
The investment is never safe and the risk and replacement of such is passed on to the customer.
Does regular cable theft occur in other countries or is it just a South African thing?

well, i know for a fact that in the UK all scrap metal dealers have to have cctv installed at their receiving end of their business. When this was introduced a few years back, it significantly reduced scrap metal-related thefts.

Telkom - South Africa's Handbrake to progress.