Falmouth BID, Town Council + Openreach Collab Restores Town To Business

Falmouth BID, town council and Openreach collaboration swiftly restores the town to critical Easter business following criminal damage.

With an unseasonaly sunny weather forecast, Falmouth’s retailers and hospitality providers were all geared up for the first key 2025 holiday trading period at the beginning of April.  However, on the evening of Saturday 5^th April, the vital fibre and copper broadband networks were hit with unfortunate damage at multiple locations in and around the port’s Arwenack Street, Church Street, Market Street and Killigrew Street areas, affecting broadband and/or telephone service to around 60 customers.

An immediate joint response was instigated across Saturday night and into Sunday morning with Devon & Cornwall Police, Openreach, Falmouth Town Council, Falmouth BID and Falmouth Town Team coming together out-of-hours to do all possible to restore the service, allowing Falmouth businesses to continue with their brisk Easter holiday trade whilst enabling residents to return to their online lives.

Devon & Cornwall Police swiftly arrested a man and Openreach had teams on site in Falmouth, restoring power and connections throughout Saturday night and Sunday morning. Falmouth Town Team – the multi-award-winning partnership between Falmouth Town Council and Falmouth BID - utilised their joint e-databases to contact all businesses in the town, urging those in the affected areas to also communicate with their surrounding neighbours to ensure optimal awareness and action to redress the crucial connectivity.

On Monday, Falmouth Town Team’s Street Rangers were dispatched to go door-to-door to each of the residences and businesses in the area to double check their service was fully back up and running.  A large majority of the damage was fixed within 48 hours with all business and residential services fully restored by Thursday at the latest.

Richard Gates of Falmouth’s Town Council and the Falmouth Town Team said: “This was a really unexpected, and unfortunate attack, for which we understand the perpetrator has been arrested and charged. Every Easter holiday is important for all Falmouth businesses, and they all work hard to be prepared for a vital boost to their takings. This year, the first Easter weekend was looking especially buoyant with amazing sunshine and a great atmosphere as locals and visitors alike headed into our beautiful town to enjoy themselves.”

Richard continued, “As soon as the issue occurred, early on Saturday evening, the Openreach system raised the alarm and we all immediately got on a Teams meeting to provide the required collaborative emergency response.  It’s this type of situation where our Falmouth network excels and we were all pleased to hear that within 48 hours, almost all businesses were back up and running, with all tills and in-house WIFI fully restored.  Our Falmouth thanks goes to all at Openreach and Devon & Cornwall Police who worked with us every step of the way to provide this swift, positive closure to a situation that could have been way more damaging had it not been resolved so quickly.”

Openreach knows Falmouth well, having just invested more than £8 million upgrading the broadband infrastructure in the town and neighbouring Penryn to gigabit-capable Full Fibre.

Andy Shepherd, Openreach’s Director of Resilience and Integrity, said: “The incident which took place in Falmouth on the evening of 5 April was unprecedented and concerning.  We take any malicious damage to our network very seriously and we’re pleased that an arrest has been made. Fortunately, these incidents are rare, but they have a huge impact on the immediate community, with livelihoods lost and vulnerable people put at risk.  The wider community is also affected as engineers are diverted from other tasks to make repairs.”

Andy continued: “We’re grateful for the excellent collaboration with the Town Management, Business Improvement District, Devon & Cornwall Police, residents and businesses of Falmouth and of course, our engineers.  We thank each and every one of them for their hard work in completing the significant repair work.”