Committee publication · Correspondence · 15 April 2026 · HC 1461
Correspondence with Utility Warehouse regarding subsea cable resilience and the impact of the 2025 outages on Shetland communities, dated 7 April 2026 & 25 March 2026
Summary
Utility Warehouse responds to Scottish Affairs Committee questions about subsea cable outages affecting Shetland in 2025. The company clarifies it is a retail broadband provider without infrastructure ownership; resilience depends on wholesale partner PXC's network. The Shefa-2 cable failure caused service loss for 222–228 customers because the alternative R100 cable had not yet been integrated into PXC's local network. Automatic rerouting capability is expected to complete this year. Affected customers received automatic Ofcom compensation at £9.98 per day.
Key findings
- Utility Warehouse operates as a retail provider over PXC's wholesale network and does not own or control subsea cable infrastructure; routing and resilience depend entirely on PXC's underlying network.
- At the time of July and October 2025 outages, the Shefa-2 cable was a single point of failure because the R100 cable had not yet been technically integrated with PXC's Shetland network, unlike other providers' arrangements.
- 222 customers in July and 228 customers in October were affected; 55 and 99 respectively reported faults directly, though actual impact may be higher. By April 2026, 145 of the October cohort remained customers.
- R100 cable integration work is ongoing with Openreach and expected to complete in 2026, at which point automatic traffic rerouting will become available to Utility Warehouse customers.
- Affected customers received automatic compensation under Ofcom's Code of Practice at £9.98 per day (from day two of outage); all payments issued within 30 days with no outstanding arrears.
Tone
FactualTopics
Key actors
Patricia Ferguson MP, Scottish Affairs Committee, Utility Warehouse, PXC (TalkTalk Communications Limited), Openreach, Ofcom, Scottish Government, BT
Notable line
“Once completed, this will introduce a secondary routing path and materially improve service resilience for Utility Warehouse customers in the event of future cable incidents.”
Key Quotes
“It does not own or operate any communications infrastructure and as such, the routing and resilience of customer traffic is determined by the underlying PXC (TalkTalk Communications Limited) network infrastructure and its interconnections.”
“At the time of the 2025 outages, the PXC network in Shetland relied on the Shefa-2 cable. The R100 cable, which provides an alternative traffic route, had not yet been connected to the PXC network locally.”
“At the time of the outages, the absence of a second operational cable connection within the PXC network meant that the Shefa-2 cable represented a single point of failure.”
“Given the availability of alternatives routes in Shetland, the Committee is concerned that resilience plans among some communications providers do not appear to be as robust as expected.”
“Customers who reported faults received compensation automatically at Ofcom-set levels. During the incident, this equated to £9.98 per day”
Source · parliament.uk record ↗