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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

#41

Post by dan1234 »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #33

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 st…

On my street, my house is one of 4 connected directly to the exchange instead of a cabinet, which means I can't get fibre (only FTTC is available here).

BT/Openreach/Whoever aren't interested in changing this, but luckily I can get Virgin Media (overpriced IMO, but better than the 20Mb alternative).

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#42

Post by kn100 »

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.

You'd be surprised how hard it is to identify SHINE. In places like this, you'll probably find the fastest broadband available is actually ADSL2+ - which is highly susceptible to noise, and in some places in the UK the lines which run to peoples houses aren't even copper, they're ALU - which is obviously not ideal. Even the tiniest of things can have an enormous impact on line performance.

I worked at a UK ISP a couple years back and lets just say the 'monitoring' that ISPS have is extremely limited. Openreach (the company that manages the phone lines, which ISPs lease) almost certainly has more monitoring but the problem is the customer calls the ISP, and the ISP then tells Openreach - which means there's a fairly huge disconnect between the customer and the engineers fixing the line.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#43

Post by iso1631 »

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.

Cable TV? Coax?

Most of the UK, especially outside of large towns, is

1) Twisted pair to the cabinet then Twisted pair to the exchange ("Normal DSL", ADSL)

2) Twisted pair to the cabinet then Fibre to the exchange ("Fibre broadband", FTTC)

3) Fibre to the cabinet then Fibre to the exchange (FTTP)

Cable TV is a minority thing in the UK, maybe 20% of TV owning households, compared with 50% on satelite of some sort, and 95% on terrestial.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#44

Post by ChildOfChaos »

dan1234 wrote: post #41
cs02rm0 wrote: post #33

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 st…

On my street, my house is one of 4 connected directly to the exchange instead of a cabinet, which means I can't get fibre (only FTTC is available here). BT/Openreach/Whoever aren't interested in changing this, but luckily I can get Virgin Media (overpriced IMO, but better than the 20Mb alternative).

I have the same, but can't get Virgin.

However I just contacted BT openreach after finding some neighboring properties can get fiber and they told me they are building a new cabinet next month, hooray!

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#45

Post by dwd »

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.

Interference is probably way down the list of potential causes.

The first customer complaint was likely just one customer to begin with and could have reported that the issue was occurring at a different time of day depending on when they used the Internet.

It wouldn't have been until they had multiple complaints and eventually a user who could pinpoint losing connection at 7:00am that they looked at it being something external to the individual customers connection.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#46

Post by tialaramex »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #33

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 st…

Five years ago (assuming you weren't exaggerating) the house builder chose not to bother calling Openreach about the new homes they were building. They chose to wait until the last minute and then say "We're a house builder, just put up a few new houses, so connect them to a phone line for us OK?"

If they instead engage at the outset, Openreach says OK, you need to put in ducting to run fibre to each house from the street and then along the street itself, our engineers will turn up and actually install fibre and enable simple phone service by default. But obviously when the engineers roll up to an estate with a dozen almost-finished houses "Dig up everything and start over" is not an option, so you get legacy copper phone lines. Too bad.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#47

Post by SummerlyMars »

andrea92 wrote: post #27

Lol, that sounds like such a weird case :D no wonder it took so long...

It reminds me of a grocery store parking lot that seemingly prevented car key fobs from working. There's a link to the explanation in the article, but it's about as light on details as the BBC article, unfortunately.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/carstairs-westview-co...

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#48

Post by gpuhacker »

I love these kind of stories. At Astron, the institute that builds and operates radio telescopes in the Netherlands, there's a story that they once gave a new TV to someone who lived a couple of villages from one of the telescopes, because the old set was causing too much radio interference. They could figure out the exact location of the old TV based on the data from the radio telescope

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#49

Post by tialaramex »

kn100 wrote: post #42
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.

You'd be surprised how hard it is to identify SHINE. In places like this, you'll probably find the fastest broadband available is actually ADSL2+ - which is highly susceptible to noise, and in some places in the UK the lines which run to peoples houses aren't even copper, they're ALU - which is obviously not ideal. Even the tiniest of things can have an enormous impact on line performance. I worked at a UK ISP a coup…

> I worked at a UK ISP a couple years back and lets just say the 'monitoring' that ISPS have is extremely limited.

That's a choice. Presumably a cost conscious choice, not a limit imposed by Openreach.

A&A presents each customer with a live updated chart of bandwidth usage, latency, and low-level polling of the DSL modem in the customer's home. If your line drops even if you aren't "using" it for anything, you can opt to get a SMS about that, and choose whether this applies at weekends or overnight.

They even plot the rate of "login"/ "logout" events for the modems, both as a whole and mapped onto exchange locations so that you can see if there's a problem beyond just you got unlucky this time.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#50

Post by C1sc0cat »

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.

coax ? how quaint - there may be a small number of customers on actual coax but this is about Openreach part of BT's plant which will be POTS copper.

Unless they actually mean that tv blew away everyone's wifi, which is impressive but unlikely.

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