Telecom Fiji Limited services were disrupted in most parts of Viti Levu on Wednesday this week due to damages sustained to their fibre optic cables during roadworks conducted by Hot Spring Road Construction. The company was subcontracted by the Fiji Roads Authority; and during works on Wednesday morning, underground fibre optic cables between Navutulevu and Naboutini Village were severely damaged.

The damages caused an outage to a significant portion of Viti Levu and affected businesses such as Goodman Fielder, Fiji Electricity Authority, Airports Fiji Limited, and other essential service providers.

Telecom Fiji chief executive officer, Mothilal Desilva, yesterday commented: “We have noticed an increase in the number of outages experienced by customers; most of which is caused by external parties.

“Damages to our underground cables have increased lately and is a costly affair for us.

“We have urged companies time and again to contact us before conducting such exercise so that we can inform them of areas that have underground cables. Our customers are very important to us and it upsets us to see that they have to suffer due to the negligence of some stakeholders. It is our humble plea to these organisations that they contact TFL during their planning phase so that we can better guide them to avoid such situations.”

Telecom Fiji Engineers were on site yesterday and services were restored the same evening.

Source: Telecom Fiji Ltd

Fiji Roads Authority response

Fiji Roads Authority confirms this incident was reported to FRA and TFL, and it was resolved in a couple of hours.

The contractor was installing guardrails at the time and FRA is still investigating what actually transpired, including TFL’s clearance to dig.

Source: Fiji Roads Authority

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