Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
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Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#2The joys of shared medium. IIRC, AVM FritzBox'es with cable modems are ridiculously locked down compared to their DSL counterparts to prevent people from hacking the DOCSIS transmitters to flood the cable with junk.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#3Fiber is immune to this kind of thing isn't it?
So it's posssibly more of a story about the ISP being cheap.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#4Someone needs to explain why it took 18 months to figure this out considering how simple it was to detect.
You have a problem that's repeatable right on schedule, that presumably shows up in the logs and affects multiple customers. It should be a no-brainer to send someone with test equipment out there to measure things in the field while the problem was happening.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#5The joys of shared medium. IIRC, AVM FritzBox'es with cable modems are ridiculously locked down compared to their DSL counterparts to prevent people from hacking the DOCSIS transmitters to flood the cable with junk.
> hacking the DOCSIS transmitters to flood the cable with junk
Can't any other modem (on which you have root access) be used to flood it? Furthermore why are they even worried about a modem when someone with malicious intent can just ground the cable or even send mains electricity into it and permanently damage all the equipment on the line?
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#6Fiber is immune to this kind of thing isn't it? So it's posssibly more of a story about the ISP being cheap.
There might be fiber running up the village.
If the speed doesn't saturate DSL or coax standards, running fiber to every home is not very wise, even for long term.
Until recently, fiber was not even that cheap to distribute in larger cities. It's been 3-4 years since the city I live in switched to FTTX distribution.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#7Fiber is immune to this kind of thing isn't it? So it's posssibly more of a story about the ISP being cheap.
There might be fiber running up the village. If the speed doesn't saturate DSL or coax standards, running fiber to every home is not very wise, even for long term. Until recently, fiber was not even that cheap to distribute in larger cities. It's been 3-4 years since the city I live in switched to FTTX distribution.
> running fiber to every home is not very wise, even for long term.
Why not?
Old copper will keep deteriorating and spending money repairing it is a waste. Fiber on the other hand is future-proof for the next ~50 years provided it's kept in good condition as you can increase bandwidth by upgrading equipment at both ends without replacing the actual glass.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#8Someone needs to explain why it took 18 months to figure this out considering how simple it was to detect. You have a problem that's repeatable right on schedule, that presumably shows up in the logs and affects multiple customers. It should be a no-brainer to send someone with test equipment out there to measure things in the field while the problem was happening.
> that presumably shows up in the logs
Ah, no. SNR problems in the shared medium is not something wathced or logged. I remember losing internet connection on heavy rains sometimes because an odd cable shorted at an underground gallery. It wasn't FTTX then, so it was not easy to find.
> You have a problem that's repeatable right on schedule.
Similar problems rooted to bandwidth scarcity happened all the time, so in a village I'm not sure there's a lot of people who can discern the difference between, ah it's slow again and Oh, I lost connection, look at that SNR value. I better write a technical report to ISP.
> It should be a no-brainer to send someone with test equipment out there to measure things in the field while the problem was happening.
Even the simplest problem, if it's happening 1 in 10.000 is not a no-brainer because, you won't think that'd happen. Especially because of an old TV.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#9Fiber is immune to this kind of thing isn't it? So it's posssibly more of a story about the ISP being cheap.
Fiber is immune to this kind of interference yes. However fiber is not immune to the ISP being incompetent and taking 18 months to figure out a relatively simple problem, so I suspect the same ISP will also manage to screw things up when it comes to diagnosing fiber issues.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#10Fiber is immune to this kind of thing isn't it? So it's posssibly more of a story about the ISP being cheap.
There might be fiber running up the village. If the speed doesn't saturate DSL or coax standards, running fiber to every home is not very wise, even for long term. Until recently, fiber was not even that cheap to distribute in larger cities. It's been 3-4 years since the city I live in switched to FTTX distribution.
Chișinău - the capital of Moldova, the poorest country in Europe - had fiber Internet back in 2008. I don't think North America couldn't afford fiber earlier too, it's just why do it when your current infrastructure works and you can milk the customers as you please due to lack of competition.