Cable thieves left thousands of people in Thurnscoe, a village in South Yorkshire, without broadband or telephone connections for two days. South Yorkshire Police said manhole covers on Nicholas Lane in nearby Goldthorpe were stolen on the Friday morning, with wiring in the area damaged. An investigation is under way.
Who it actually hurt
Residents said elderly relatives were left cut off with no other way of contacting their families across the Friday and Saturday. Businesses were affected too, but the detail that matters is the one about people with no second option.
Luke Wheat, a councillor for the affected Dearne North ward, put it plainly: “For many of our elderly and vulnerable residents, this is their only means of connection to the outside world.” He called the theft “mindless” and said he would write to the mayor and local MPs demanding stronger policing.
An Openreach spokesperson apologised to those affected, said cable theft “is a serious crime and can have a significant impact on communities”, and said engineers had worked as quickly as possible to repair extensive damage.
It is not one incident
Residents of Carcroft in Doncaster were also left without connections last week after cable thefts. Inspector Alison Carr said there had been a spike in cable thefts across Doncaster since the start of summer, and that police had recovered more than £1m worth of copper cable in the area since it began.
She noted that the figure covers only the weight of copper inside the cables — not what it costs to install the cable or repair the sites it was taken from. The real bill is a multiple of the scrap value, which is the economics of this crime in one sentence: a thief realises a few hundred pounds and the network operator spends tens of thousands.
Carr described cable theft as a “threat to public safety”.
The version of this story Bangladesh already knows
Copper theft is not a British problem; it is a copper-price problem, and it happens wherever the metal has resale value and the cable is reachable. Bangladesh has lived through its own versions — stolen transformer windings, cut telephone lines, drop cables pulled off poles in the night — and the pattern is identical: the thief takes the metal, the community loses the service, and the repair costs many times the scrap.
There is one structural difference worth naming, and it cuts in our favour. Much of Bangladesh’s last-mile access is now fibre, which has no scrap value at all. The fibre rollout was justified on speed and capacity; an underrated benefit is that nobody steals glass. Where copper remains — in power distribution especially — the exposure is unchanged.
The other transferable point is the one the councillor made. A network outage is an inconvenience for people with a mobile and a data pack, and an emergency for those without. Any country planning to retire its copper telephone network should be able to answer a simple question first: who in this area has only the landline, and what is their fallback on the day it goes down?
