'Upset' as wait for phone and internet goes on

Village residents are "upset and frustrated" after being left without landline phone and internet connection since the end of January.

People from Wootton Wawen in Warwickshire were cut off after wet weather damaged a network cable serving the village.

Residents said the date for completing repair work had been pushed back repeatedly, with local councillor Ian Shenton stating people there "used the [landline] phone in many cases as their only source of contact", including for doctors appointments.

Phone provider TalkTalk previously estimated about 800 people in the area were affected. Openreach, which is carrying out repairs, has apologised for the outage.

Users were still able to access fibre broadband, but Shenton said "a lot of" customers were linked to a copper cable phone service.

He said the original date for repairs to be completed was "something like 20 February", then it became 4 March and last week "we were told it would be 9 March".

Residents say the latest estimate has since been revised to 14 March.

The Conservative Stratford-on-Avon district councillor for Wootton Wawen added: "It just feels that it's too much effort to come and fix a copper cable.

"People feel fobbed off and disappointed and angry that it's taking so long... People are upset and frustrated about the whole thing."

He added that many customers "in this area are retired, on fixed incomes, maybe vulnerable, have medical needs".

"It's really important that this is resolved quickly and yet, here we are, some almost 40 days [without full service] and it still hasn't been resolved."

Openreach, which the BBC invited to comment this week, had previously said it was "fixing a major copper cable serving the village after recent wet weather caused flooding in an underground access point and damaged part of the network".

A spokesperson stated its engineers were replacing two large sections of cable and working overnight "to get everyone back online as quickly as possible".

Talk Talk has advised customers to contact its welfare team.

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