A breakdown in BT’s mainland network was responsible for Shetland losing its emergency communications system – the second time this has happened within a month.
Four radio masts were out of action for two hours from 5:30pm on Monday evening, but service was quickly restored.
A BT spokesman talking to Shetland News said that the problem had been caused by a transmission fault between the Inverness and Portmahomack radio stations. The fault was quickly resolved and was unrelated to the previous fault at Aberdeen in June.
Shetlands: No loss of regular broadband service
Though Shetland coastguard services were forced to man the coasts with portable radio sets, there were no incidents and there was no disruption to residents broadband services.
Shetland coastguard manager Neville Davis said there was nothing out of the ordinary about the outage, which was a part of life working in the islands.
“If we had a level of downtime that was much, much higher then I would be concerned, but at the moment there is nothing untoward here. We have alternative means of getting people to listen to aerials,” he said.
Last month, copper thieves kicked the Shetland Islands when they were down following a similar outage. A knock-on effect of cable theft in the north of England meant that the Islands suffered an overnight broadband blackout which BT quickly restored.
On Monday, hours before the outage, Shetland Telecoms’ Marvin Smith spoke of plans to have every property and premises on the Islands able to get connections of at least 24Mbps by 2016.
Image credit: Flickr user Badderspj
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