Repair vessel due at cable site on Saturday as internet outage continues
A CABLE repair vessel is expected at the site of a ruptured subsea internet cable tomorrow afternoon (Saturday).
However the company which owns the fibre optic cable, Shefa, said the repairs may only be completed by Wednesday.
Hundreds of people in Shetland and Orkney have been without internet since the early hours of Saturday 26 July, with Vodafone, TalkTalk and Sky customers worst affected.
Vodafone has told MP Alistair Carmichael it expects its services to be back up and running on Sunday.
The company met with the politician on Thursday to provide an update on the outage, which has left many without connection and drawn criticism from politicians.
Carmichael was told Vodafone is “working on other solutions” which may provide some relief to affected customers before Sunday.
“I have made it clear to VodafoneThree that their current lack of resilience within the Northern Isles remains problematic and impressed upon them the need to continue to build resilience once this is resolved,” the MP said in a letter to a constituent.
A fishing vessel is believed to have damaged the Shefa-2 subsea cable in the early hours of Saturday morning, with the owner of the vessel reporting the damage to the Maritime and Coastguard Agency on Sunday.
The repair vessel Cable Vigilance is scheduled to arrive off Kirkwall at 8am tomorrow morning for a crew transfer, before arriving at the fault site around midday.
The disruption has caused a number of issues for Shetland businesses, and it comes on the back of people in the North Isles and the North Mainland also losing mobile signal and 4G last week.
Earlier this week Carmichael encouraged anyone with poor experiences of network providers to get in touch.
Vodafone has been approached for an update.
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