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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

#51

Post by tialaramex »

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).

Openreach certainly are interested in converting homes from EO to a street cabinet and have done this many times, but that's little comfort to you because they haven't done yours yet.

In some cases Openreach converts from EO to FTTP, so you go from only having very poor ADSL2 available to 300Mbps or better available over fibre.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#52

Post by hunta2097 »

implements wrote: post #39
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.

Ungrounded (floating) switching power supplies can emit a lot of high frequency noise. Unfortunately this is the majority of PSUs these days.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#53

Post by xenadu02 »

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 says they did a cable replacement. I suspect that took some time and they thought it would resolve the problem. They were probably quite surprised when it didn't.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#54

Post by xenadu02 »

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.

This happened in SF. Sonic ran fiber out in Sunset. Suddenly, and by coincidence I'm sure, AT&T found the money to start upgrading to fiber in the exact same neighborhoods.

If you live in SF definitely check if Sonic's own fiber is available to you. Most of Sunset and Richmond have it. Some parts of Castro, Mission, and SOMA (I think) last I checked. $60/month for gigabit symmetric.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#55

Post by aaron695 »

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.

Can you explain what has happened here at a technical level?

What was the TV interfering with exactly? The ISP's equipment coming into the village?

I don't understand how you know it was simple. It's not clear to me what happened in the BBC article.

> You have a problem that's repeatable right on schedule

This is incorrect, the TV had to be turned on. Hyperbolic quotes on BBC like "It turned out that at 7am every morning " are not actually going to be true in the field.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#56

Post by jacquesm »

aussieguy1234 wrote: post #40
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.

With removing a single line of code, and in some cases even just a spurious period or comma.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#57

Post by brutusborn »

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…

What does the (!) after "busy" mean? P.s. Thankyou for sharing your experience, it's very insightful.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#58

Post by andreasley »

gpuhacker wrote: post #48

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

Or microwave ovens posing as astronomical objects [1].

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/astrophysics/m...

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#60

Post by lima »

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…

> Ah, no. SNR problems in the shared medium is not something wathced or logged.

A good ISP definitely does monitor SNR. It's a basic metric available from each individual customer device.

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