Vodafone Says UK Service Is Being Restored After Network Theft - Bloomberg

Vodafone Group Plc said most U.K. voice calling affected by an overnight theft that damaged equipment and left some customers without network access is running again.

"Several hundred thousand" customers of the world's largest mobile-phone operator by revenue may have lost voice, data, and text service this morning, which is now being progressively restored, the company said in a posting on its official Web forum.

A break-in at a network facility in Basingtoke, southern England, last night caused the outage, which Vodafone said mostly affected customers along the M4 highway corridor that runs from west London toward Cardiff, Wales.

Vodafone has about 19 million customers in the U.K., where it competes primarily with Telefonica SA's O2 unit and Everything Everywhere, a joint venture between France Telecom SA and Deutsche Telekom AG.

Newbury, England-based Vodafone's Australian unit in December apologized to customers for poor network performance after a series of "intermittent network issues." The unit has announced plans to upgrade network equipment.

To contact the reporter on this story: Matthew Campbell in Paris at mcampbell39@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Vidya Root at vroot@bloomberg.net;