Bell Telephone officials say they’re unsure how many Northern Telephone customers from Temiskaming Shores to Hearst were impacted by the cut in the fibre optic cable in Schumacher on Sunday.
Network services director David Joice says vandals were at the cause of the break stealing copper wiring.
“And as they were doing they also cut the fibres that carry these voice signals to and from customers,” he said. “Probably just a note in a these type of incidents have escalated since the start of 2022. We’ve tracked well over 550 incidents like this all of Canada.”
He adds that federal and provincial laws need to be tougher on criminals to prevent further issues in the future.
Joice says there are no lingering affects.
“We had it up by 10 pm so it started at 10 am to 10 pm which was relatively fast, typically these types of things take 18 hours,” he said. “So I’m really proud of the team in Schumacher to fix that outage so quickly it was very complicated.”