It’s been quite a week! As some people will know, the subsea fibre cable just off Tiree broke last Friday during Storm Amy, leaving the island without internet!
Power came back after the storm (thankfully!), but broadband didn’t – and it’s taken a huge effort to get the island back up and running. But things are still not sorted.
Despite the BT Resilience Team working with islanders to get connections and phones restored, only a number of key facilities are connected (the doctor’s surgery, Bùth a’ Bhaile and a number of other key public locations), so holiday homes and many residents are still without the ability to connect to the internet, a situation which may continue for some time.
The Phones are also affected. EE is working marginally, O2 and Vodafone are offline and may be for some time.
For the Internet, repairs to the subsea cable may take weeks or longer (BT open reach told us today it could be December!), so anybody coming to the island should prepare for disruption to their calls and ability to retrieve emails and surf the Net.
We’re here on the island this week, and brought over an EE ”Pay as you Go’ SIM card, which is working at speeds between 3mb and 20mb. Enough to connect to the internet even from the cottage!! However, we cant phone out on Vodafone or O2 unless we’re using WhatsApp. Therefore, we have to advise for circumstances completely beyond our control, Stuthan Cottage currently has no wifi for the next few weeks.
We would therefore recommend guests to bring an EE SIM card with them if they need access to the internet and calls. Not ideal but all visitors to the island in the coming weeks need to be aware of the situation. Contactless is down throughout the island, meaning cash and inserting your cards, is the way forward for now. We’ll keep everybody updated here when Vodafone, O2 and the Fibre utility providers get repairs underway.
