Receiving a call from our customer asking for urgent assistance late one Friday in December, our Fixed Network Services team jumped into action.

Several large optical fibre cables had been cut by a crew at a construction site in Sydney. The cables were accidentally severed during concrete cutting when a bank of conduits was hit. The incident caused an outage and required immediate action in order to minimise disruption.

The Fixed Networks team were immediately able to divert two fibre splicers, who were working night shift on another project, to the scene to commence rectification works. Fibre splicing is a technical skill which, put simply, involves joining two optic fibres together permanently by fusing them using an electronic arc. The process can be incredibly time consuming as the fibre is very small and fragile to handle.

In this case, the concrete cutting had taken out 5 cables, meaning the fibre splicers were required to conduct almost 3,000 splices to restore the network.

By 6am on Saturday morning, additional fibre splicers and field managers had been dispatched and the team was working around the clock, in shifts. Working across the weekend they were able to restore all services by Monday morning.

A great example of teamwork, as well as going above and beyond for our client.

^{Pictured above: One of our fibre splicers in action}