Fiber is immune to this kind of thing isn't it? So it's posssibly more of a story about the ISP being cheap.
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Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
11–20 of 304 posts
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Old copper will keep deteriorating and spending money repairing it is a waste.
Because until fiber becomes economical, you can use your existing infrastructure and keep it up for minimal expense. A carefully installed outdoor cable is extremely resilient to elements, even over long term.
Then, after a certain point, instead of running two infrastructures, you can piggyback everything to even higher capacity fiber and distribute with it only. Break it out with FTTX infra or so-called pizza boxes so, you can provide the same services with less strands and maintenance (presuming your netops team is competent).
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#13Someone 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…
> SNR problems in the shared medium is not something wathced or logged
This is a problem then and should be addressed.
> problems rooted to bandwidth scarcity happened all the time
But the ISP should be able to tell whether their uplink is saturated (and actually upgrade it if it happens too often), so if they're consistently getting complaints around a certain timeframe and the uplink is not saturated during those timeframes then it must be something else.
> Especially because of an old TV
But the diagnostic procedure had nothing to do whether it's an old TV or something else. It was caused by EMI and is detectable with readily-available test equipment which indeed detected it immediately.
Furthermore monitoring packet loss at the PPP level can be done (in fact, Andrews & Arnold - a small ISP in the UK - does it) so if an ISP doesn't have this in place to detect widespread faults then something is also wrong there - why are they operating with zero visibility on their network?
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#14The 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?
Why mains?
https://youtu.be/9M_OX-O9JKk
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you cannot provide the network speeds to saturate the network you install, using smaller pipes, investing in uplink speeds and then replacing the infra is cheaper on the longer term because since higher speeds become the standard, the equipment gets cheaper and better built.
Telco class equipment is not exactly cheap in any standard.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#16Fiber is immune to this kind of thing isn't it? So it's posssibly more of a story about the ISP being cheap.
There's a push in the UK over the last few years to get broadband out to the small villages, who've been stuck on pathetically slow due to their distance from telephone exchanges.
How it's being pushed out is a hodge-podge of technologies, Microwave, FTTx, Wi-fi repeaters - and mixtures of those and more. My guess is that it was the latter that was being interfered with in this case.
As to why it took so long to diagnose, well telcos being useless is pretty common (although 18 months is quite impressive).
Maybe they were just blaming the backhaul, but once that was fixed, was obvious problem was on the last-mile (and may have been different providers)
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#17Fiber is immune to this kind of thing isn't it? So it's posssibly more of a story about the ISP being cheap.
In the UK we've got two levels: the ISPs (who don't put cable or fibre in the ground) and the network (who don't provide ISP services but do maintain the cables / fibre).
In this example customers would have been calling their ISP to complain, and having to go through the layers of escalation.
Also, it's a pretty remote location. Lots of rural areas in the UK have terrible Internet. I think this is the area in Google maps.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Aberhosan,+Machynlleth+S...
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#18Fiber 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.
> If the speed doesn't saturate DSL or coax standards, running fiber to every home is not very wise, even for long term.
Why not? Fiber is fast, less prone to rust, doesn't have the shared media problem of cable internet and is cheap to maintain. If the uplink gets saturated you can replace one big fiber instead of putting additional hardware in the local POP to get just a little bit more speed out of DSL.
It was economical enough to put fiber down in the 20k village where I was born about a decade ago even though there was already cable and 30mbps DSL. I can understand the US being hard to get fiber down due to exclusivity contracts with ISPs for buildings or even cities as well as the distances you need to dig to reach a city, but as far as I know the UK is not affected by any of that.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#19Fiber is immune to this kind of thing isn't it? So it's posssibly more of a story about the ISP being cheap.
Fibre deployments are very expensive; very often it makes no sense whatsoever to deploy fibre, especially to rural communities.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#20Fiber 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.
Yeah, funny how ISPs in rich countries can't afford infrastructure upgrades.
Until some competition shows up. Too bad Google Fiber stopped expanding in the US, i remember reading that everywhere they showed up the "traditional" ISPs suddenly found money to upgrade their infrastructure and reduce prices.