Danehill resident’s broadband down for nearly two weeks after Storm Eunice hits Mid Sussex

Bill Humphrey, 52, of Horsted Lane, said his house lost electricity and broadband at about 10am during the severe weather on Friday (February 18).

He said he reported the issue immediately to both his internet provider Vodafone and UK Power Network.

“I took a walk up the road to try and see what the problem was and there were two different issues,” said Bill, who lives with his wife Nina and their four children.

He said a large tree branch had fallen and was resting a power line onto a phone line, which was over the road.

“A bigger problem further up the road was that a whole tree had come down and taken out the phone line completely to about eight houses,” said Bill.

After days without power or internet, Bill said someone from Openreach came to look at the problem on Tuesday (February 22).

But he said they could not do anything about the issue because the power cable was touching the broadband line.

He said UK Power Network cut the tree down that evening and restored the electricity but the broadband remained down.

Bill said he works for a large financial services company in London, supporting a foreign exchange production system, and was not able to work from home.

“I have no phone connectivity,” he said, adding that he has virtually no mobile signal in the area either, even after purchasing two antennas to try to boost it.

Bill said he either had to work from his mother’s house or commute to London to work in the office.

He was concerned that having to take the train to work during the current Covid situation could have put his family at risk.

He also feared that he would not be able to contact emergency services quickly if he needed to.

“We were pretty much cut off from the outside world,” he said, adding that calling Vodafone and Openreach about the issue had been frustrating too because of the bad signal.

He said he called them several times and felt he was getting nowhere.

“I’d been chasing Vodafone because every time you try to contact Openreach they say you need to go through your service provider,” said Bill.

“You can’t have a direct conversation with Openreach.”

Bill said he tried ‘escalating’ the problem with Vodafone on Thursday (February 24) by highlighting it as a safety issue and emailed them a photo of the broken cable.

“The update I got on Tuesday (February 22) was that there would be an update on March 1,” said Bill.

But he said the March 1 update was ‘that there is no update from Openreach and the next available update will be March 11’.

Thankfully, after the Middy got in touch with Vodafone and Openreach, Bill said that the connection had been fixed on Thursday (March 3).

When the line was down he called the feedback from both Vodafone and Openreach ‘really poor’.

“There just doesn’t seem to be any urgency or any understanding of the situation that people are in when they don’t have a mobile phone signal to fall back on,” he said.

“Openreach never want to talk to the individual, they only want to go through that third party,” added Bill, saying that he did not receive an explanation about the nature of the problem and how long it would take to fix.

A Vodafone UK spokesperson said: “The significant storms across the UK impacted some of our service due to infrastructure damage.

“Mr Humphrey’s line was reported to us as damaged, and we immediately instructed Openreach to restore the affected lines but, due to the extent of the damage, there was a slightly longer delay in restoring the service.

“Openreach have now fixed the line and we have spoken to Mr Humphrey to confirm his service has been fully restored.”