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Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

bbc.com

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Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#21

Post by Nextgrid »

goldcd wrote: post #16
nottorp wrote: post #3

Fiber 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 diag…

> a hodge-podge of technologies, Microwave, FTTx, Wi-fi repeaters - and mixtures of those and more

Most of which is being falsely advertised as fibre and peppered with bullshit marketing terms like "superfast" or "ultrafast" which means consumers have a very hard time comparing the different offers and understanding what they're actually getting.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#22

Post by bayindirh »

Nextgrid wrote: post #13
bayindirh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> 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.

They concluded that something is fishy because normal procedures didn't fix anything. I'm not sure that this is a problem they diagnose 5 times a week.

> 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.

Good luck escalating this problem from a village to correct people in a big-shiny-ISP(TM). They're too busy(!) to look for 10 customers' problem. I accept that 18 months in unacceptable but, this is the reality we're in. Support and Ops teams are always overworked because management thinks that "the load just doesn't justify more hands in that department".

> This is a problem then and should be addressed.

The backbone operators and ISPs doesn't monitor SNR levels because they're transient and doesn't provide meaningful data. If you want to do it, it's millions of connections. Also, Not everyone use the standard equipment provided by the ISP so, they cannot get info from all devices (e.g.: from mine). So, endpoint ops are complex if you're working on a WAN with random equipment.

Instead, using bandwidth graphs to find problems is more practical and reliable. Since the problem starts at 07:00, it shows like "They're not using their connections much, eh?" in the said graphs.

Disclosure: My workplace also happens to be the national academic network operator. I'm two hops away from a country-wide core router.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#23

Post by bayindirh »

nottorp wrote: post #20
bayindirh wrote: post #6

Earlier 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.

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.

> Yeah, funny how ISPs in rich countries can't afford infrastructure upgrades.

Yeah, you're right. I'm writing my answers with pure naivety. There's also "Meh, we're earning enough money, no need to make customers happier" mentality which I find really, really wrong.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#24

Post by C1sc0cat »

dragosmocrii wrote: post #10
bayindirh wrote: post #6

Earlier 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.

"The Capital" is the key here - I bet service to small remote villages not so much.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#25

Post by jayflux »

DanBC wrote: post #17
nottorp wrote: post #3

Fiber 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…

> 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).

Mostly true, I believe Virgin put their own cables in the ground, and younger companies like hyperoptic.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#26

Post by crote »

nottorp wrote: post #3

Fiber is immune to this kind of thing isn't it? So it's posssibly more of a story about the ISP being cheap.

Actually, it isn't!

While commercial fiber is usually point-to-point, consumer-grade fiber commonly uses a Passive Optical Network. Basically, a single fiber is split to multiple devices, and the upstream device allocates time slots to devices in which they can transmit. Just like what's happening with cable internet.

This means that, theoretically, a rogue end-user device could ignore the timeslot allocation and disrupt the signals sent by other devices. But because every user ends up using exactly the same equipment, I highly doubt this ever happens in practice. There's nobody connecting ancient analogue devices to fiberoptic cables, after all.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#28

Post by C1sc0cat »

bayindirh wrote: post #8
Nextgrid wrote: post #4

Someone 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…

This is openretch (openreach) not Virgin so not sure where you get shared medium from

I do know people who worked in radio interference and they told me one time they traced a fault to a Budgie cage.

The Budgie had a swing and when it was in use it caused a short which effected the subs (customer) line.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#29

Post by cimnine »

nottorp wrote: post #3

Fiber is immune to this kind of thing isn't it? So it's posssibly more of a story about the ISP being cheap.

Not necessarily. Some infrastructure providers build P2MP (point-to-multipoint) fibre topologies with passive splitters. Which means that there's a shared medium once again for some part of the way to the next switch/router. As I understand it, if one device does not honour the assigned timings and sends constantly, then this would result in the same problem as with the malfunctioning TV. See e.g. https://www.tutorialspoint.com/ftth/ftth_epon.htm to learn more on the P2MP topic.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#30

Post by hellweaver666 »

I remember back when I worked support for a broadband supplier, long-term "unsolvable" problems were almost always related to dodgy electronic devices in the house. Most common of all was Christmas lights! (you would be surprised how many people put them up in October!)
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