We had some the turf removed in and a fence put up in our front garden this weekend and we discovered that our broadband cables are really shallowly buried (less than an inch under the soil) and not in any kind of armouring, so when the workers for the fence came we'd made sure to make sure to let them know where what we thought was our broadband cable was so that they wouldn't damage it, and they were very good and made sure not to.
However, it turns out that cable is actually our neighbour's broadband cable (for some reason their cable runs entirely on our land and doesn't run across their land at all, which I find strange and can't see the reasoning behind, as they have their own front garden and there's no reason their cable shouldn't or couldn't run across their land to their box). Ours was buried ever so slightly deeper (maybe another half inch), so we didn't see it, and must've been cut at some point during the day while they were digging holes for the fence posts. But we didn't realise until the work was completed.
We have a VM engineer coming out, but a fence post that is now concreted in is blocking the other end of the severed cable that comes from the street and I'm sure that Open Reach may need to be called to resolve the issue.
I can't find anything concrete online about who is liable in this situation, and Virgin make it physically impossible to speak to an actual human being for any kind of support. You can't even tell the engineer what the problem is before they come. So I'm really worried that we will be charged by Virgin or OpenReach for something that was a genuine accident, especially when we'd been so careful as to make sure what we thought was the cable wasn't damaged cut.
It's honestly so shallowly buried I'm surprised it hasn't been damaged before doing simple gardening. Basically I just want to know if we will be expected to pay Open Reach if they need to come out to do the repair?
