Connectivity / Crucial connectivity meeting to be held in Lerwick
REPRESENTATIVES of some of the country’s largest telecommunication companies will meet with regulators and local politicians in Lerwick on Friday to present their proposals of how to improve the resilience of the islands’ poor connectivity links.
They have been invited by Shetland’s Lib Dem politicians Alistair Carmichael and Beatrice Wishart after many islanders suffered a 25-day internet outage in October when the Faroese owned Shefa-2 subsea cable became damaged off Orkney.
The Northern Isles Resilience Forum, to be held at the Islesburgh Community Centre, will start with a behind closed door roundtable discussion in the morning, followed by a public meeting at 1pm.
The meeting will be attended by representatives from Vodafone/Three, BT and Openreach, Sky and Faroese Telecom, as well as local companies Shetland Telecom and Shetland Broadband.
Regulator Ofgem as well as representatives from the UK Government and Scottish business minister Richard Lochhead will also be attending.
The council will be represented by head of development Neil Grant and council leader Emma Macdonald, who is also the local Lib Dems’ candidate at the forthcoming Scottish parliamentary elections.
However, some service providers such as TalkTalk, Virgin and Utility Warehouse have declined Carmichael and Wishart’s invitation to come north.
Customers of providers including Vodafone, Sky and TalkTalk were without service for more than three weeks from 3 October, while companies with more resilience in their set-up, such as BT and Shetland Telecom, were not affected by the outage at all.
On top of that some beleaguered customers who arranged to switch to a different provider during the outage suffered delays in getting connected once the cable was fixed.
Shetland News heard from one Vodafone customer who changed provider to Plusnet during the disruption, but a delay in getting people switched meant they were without broadband internet for a whole month.
The outage was the second such failure this year and the third in as many years.
Isles MP Carmichael said he and Wishart have organised the meeting to introduce some transparency and accountability.
He said he was confident that providers would come up with a “plan B” that will improve their services and give local customers reliable connectivity.
Meanwhile, speaking from Faroe while on a fact-finding visit to Shetland’s neighbouring island group, the SNP’s election candidate Hannah Mary Goodlad said not a single Faroese business or household had been affected when the Shefa-2 cable was damaged in October.
“In Shetland, people were cut off for weeks. The difference is simple: Faroe Telecom is locally owned, locally controlled and internet providers must connect into more than one cable route,” she said.
“In Shetland we are dependent on large private companies, overseen by a distant UK Government that has allowed this vulnerability in our digital system to occur.
“Technical systems fail – of course they do. That’s exactly why one connection path is never enough. In 2025, leaving a lifeline link this exposed is indefensible.”
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