Fibrus customers to get compensation after storm

Broadband firm Fibrus will pay customers compensation for disruption caused by Storm Éowyn.

Domestic customers will receive £5 a day for service interruptions that lasted more than 48 hours, while business customers will receive £10 a day.

Storm Éowyn brought winds of more than 90mph to Northern Ireland on 24 January, damaging electricity and telecoms infrastructure.

Fibrus senior managers have been facing questions from a Stormont committee.

The company has said that 40,000 of their customers were without service at the peak of the storm.

Just over 60 customers are still experiencing storm-related service problems.

Shane Haslem, chief operating officer at Fibrus, said the company could have triggered a "force majeure" clause meaning they would not have had to pay compensation but it chose not to.

Force majeure is a legal term that refers to an extraordinary event that makes it impossible for a party to fulfill their contractual obligations.

Fibrus managers defended the firm's response to Storm Éowyn.

Dominic Kearns, the chief executive, told the committee that because a large part of its network was focused on hard-to-reach rural areas , its infrastructure was predominately overhead cables.

He said if the network was fully underground it would have been 10 times more expensive to build.

Mr Kearns said the ability of Fibrus to restore service in the early stages "relied heavily" on NIE restoring their network.

The company also uses infrastructure owned by another firm, Openreach, for 80% of its network.

Mr Kearns said it had been "unfair" to compare the speed at which electricity and broadband had been restored.

"Fibre networks are more complex in their nature and take longer to repair," he told the assembly members.

He acknowledged effective communication was "challenging" in the early stages of storm and it was only after electricity had been restored that they had a full picture of network damage to share with customers.

He added that updates could have been more frequent and detailed.

"Many of our customers will not be aware of the dependencies [on NIE and Openreach] and we intend to publicise this more clearly in the future," he said.

In 2020, Fibrus received £165m government funding to improve rural internet connectivity in Northern Ireland.

The firm started redundancy consultations with some construction staff last year under plans to grow its customer facing areas and reduce the workforce in network construction.