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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

#31

Post by bayindirh »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #28
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…

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.

If you're running network over coax alongside cable TV, it's shared medium.

I'm not in the UK or US though, so regardless of their name, every ISP is equal and is indeed a bog standard ISP from my vantage point.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#32

Post by C1sc0cat »

Nextgrid wrote: post #21
goldcd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you expect every out of the way place has its own challenges.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#33

Post by cs02rm0 »

I naively thought this was going to be somewhere like rural India, not the UK (albeit relatively rural Wales).

I'm forever calling out engineers because the line crackles to the point it's difficult to take a call and my internet speed drops from ~65Mbps to ~10. Maybe I should start looking for old TVs.

Somehow, being on a road where the houses were only built 5 years ago we have copper lines and on my side of the street the houses on both sides of mine are able to sign up for g.fast but I'm not. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised it was the UK at all.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#34

Post by Nextgrid »

bayindirh wrote: post #22
Nextgrid wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

> because normal procedures didn't fix anything

But why did it take 18 months to realize that? You've got an issue that occurs consistently and is preventing customers from getting the service they're paying for (and are presumably in contracts so they can't even cancel without a major fight).

> They're too busy(!) to look for 10 customers' problem

So we're in agreement that this is unacceptable and resolving this problem has been grossly mismanaged and someone should be held accountable?

> doesn't monitor SNR levels because they're transient and doesn't provide meaningful data

This seems weird to me. You've got a nationwide network designed to run on old, poor quality wiring (the article doesn't specify whether it's DSL or coax, but it would apply to both). Wiring issues should be expected and automated processes in place to monitor it and quickly detect issues like this one.

> Not everyone use the standard equipment provided by the ISP

Can't this be collected at the DSLAM or CMTS level? Or in case of DSL, even at the PPP level? (Andrews & Arnold - a small DSL ISP in the UK - measures packet loss at that level and while it's not true SNR, it would be enough for these purposes as localized packet loss would pretty much always mean bad SNR or failing equipment)

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#35

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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.

considering the thousands of bad ux experiences to outright bugs I encounter every day, considering that some of them are bugs that have lasted for more than a year, considering I just wrote up a 20 page proposal on fixing the search for a pretty big Scandinavian site is obviously costing them money by not having it fixed on stuff that has been the same way for years, considering the governmental sites I am forced to use that are abusively bad and that companies put up job advertisements bragging about how they made these sites and that if you come work for them you will get to work on those sites as well...

considering all that, why do they need to explain something took 18 months to fix that affected a few people again? Because I'm starting to think you must live in some sort of paradise I have been cast out of, and it's not fair!

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#36

Post by jayflux »

Nextgrid wrote: post #21
goldcd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Most of which is being falsely advertised as fibre

Last I checked If part of the journey is fibre (to the cabinet etc), they can legally advertise as fibre. They can’t advertise a service as fibre if non of the journey uses fibre.

These days the advertisements need to make performance claims, so they can’t just say “it’s fibre” they need to say what speed you’ll get.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#38

Post by milankragujevic »

bayindirh wrote: post #31
C1sc0cat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're running network over coax alongside cable TV, it's shared medium. I'm not in the UK or US though, so regardless of their name, every ISP is equal and is indeed a bog standard ISP from my vantage point.

BT openreach mainly does DSL and FTTH, AFAIK.

edit:

Just to clarify, FTTH is by definition a shared medium, but the huge capacity in practice means that there is little congestion usually.

Also, since glass fiber is a dielectric, it is difficult to get noise in the signal, and it is immune to EMI.

DSL is by definition a dedicated medium, having a twisted pair wire from the DSLAM at the central office or street cabinet to the user premises into the [splitter and] modem. One user per twisted pair only.

However, the wires are not shielded and thus are susceptible to both crosstalk from other pairs and also EMI given that it's using electrical signals to transfer data.

And of course, the speeds are low for most users due to the local loop length and in general VDSL2 35b maxes out at 300/100 Mbps at around ~80 meters, and VDSL2 17a maxes out at 100/50 Mbps at around 100 meters.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#39

Post by implements »

hellweaver666 wrote: post #30

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!)

Power sockets with built-in usb charging ports also emit a fair bit of RF interference - we had to move the kitchen radio because of it.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#40

Post by aussieguy1234 »

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.

It's not surprising. As a software engineer I've seen bugs that took days to track down which were fixed with a single line of code.
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