Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months • Hacker News Board

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#71

Post by sippingjippers » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 11:04 AM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #51

dan1234 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think past around 20Mbit or so the returns are diminishing. My flat has 400Mbit or so from Virgin, and although the WiFi is excellent (uncontended airwaves around here), actually availing of it requires you perched within reasonable proximity of the router, and pulling from a site with a large enough outbound pipe. On average it is probably fair to expect 8Mbit/s egress from any particular Internet site, with worst case much lower than that.

Probably the faster connection has some latency benefit, but on the whole I wouldn't factor "super fast Internet" into choosing my next place to live

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#72

Post by mschuster91 » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 11:06 AM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #5

mschuster91 wrote: post #2

The 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?

> 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?

At least as far as I know, cable-tv networks and devices are protected against both of these failure modes: grounding should trigger a fuse in the amplifier which means at worst it's one's own house that is cut off, sending mains on the line should not be problematic as overvoltage protection is present anywhere across the line because of lightning strike protection, and customer-side equipment should be capacitively coupled only.

Sending crap on intended frequencies that have no protection across the network however is a real problem.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#73

Post by heraclius » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 11:07 AM UTC

thinkloop wrote: post #63

mellosouls wrote: post #61

The embarrassed householder promised not to use the television again. I hope the cable company bought the "mortified" TV owner (possibly old/poor) a new TV because they've done nothing obviously wrong.

> I hope the cable company bought the "mortified" TV owner (possibly old/poor) a new TV because they've done nothing obviously wrong. I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to jam public signals village-wide: https://www.fcc.gov/general/jammer-enforcement

I should be rather surprised if the FCC were the relevant body in Wales.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#74

Post by LeonM » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 11:10 AM UTC

popotamonga wrote: post #67

Everytime i turn on my fan, my computer screen goes black for 2 seconds, only when used on same outlet.

That's not RF interference, but a phenomenon known as brownout [0].

When the fan spins up it draws more power, this causes the voltage to drop at the outlet, which causes the powersupply in the monitor to (temporarily) shut down.

Normally, this shouldn't happen. So either the monitor is badly designed or old (the capacitors may have dried out), or you have a wiring issue in your house. The latter is a fire hazard. You should test the same scenario with other outlets in your house. If it does not happen there, then there may be something wrong with the wiring to your computer outlet, have an electrician look at it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownout_(electricity)

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#75

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 11:10 AM UTC

thinkloop wrote: post #63

mellosouls wrote: post #61

The embarrassed householder promised not to use the television again. I hope the cable company bought the "mortified" TV owner (possibly old/poor) a new TV because they've done nothing obviously wrong.

> I hope the cable company bought the "mortified" TV owner (possibly old/poor) a new TV because they've done nothing obviously wrong. I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to jam public signals village-wide: https://www.fcc.gov/general/jammer-enforcement

[deleted]

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#76

Post by traceroute66 » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 11:13 AM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #18

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.

> 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 eco…

"as far as I know the UK is not affected by any of that."

The UK is affected by pig-ignorant landords refusing to give wayleave to carriers to install fibre. IIRC the problem affects 70% of fibre installs.

Westminster are working on an amendment to the law which will address this very problem.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#77

Post by watermanio » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 11:14 AM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #46

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 s…

My last home was built about 5 years ago, and the house builder had fitted fibre ducting to the curb, but when OpenReach turned up they came with a ladder and slung up a copper cable.

Maybe on a massive development they will install brand new street cabinets, but anything smaller than a few hundred homes, copper is still the standard.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#78

Post by richardwhiuk » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 11:15 AM UTC

heraclius wrote: post #73

thinkloop wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope the cable company bought the "mortified" TV owner (possibly old/poor) a new TV because they've done nothing obviously wrong. I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to jam public signals village-wide: https://www.fcc.gov/general/jammer-enforcement

I should be rather surprised if the FCC were the relevant body in Wales.

Yes, but Ofcom is, and has very similar legislation - https://www.ofcom.org.uk/spectrum/interference-enforcement/s...

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#79

Post by kube-system » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 11:16 AM UTC

heraclius wrote: post #73

thinkloop wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope the cable company bought the "mortified" TV owner (possibly old/poor) a new TV because they've done nothing obviously wrong. I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to jam public signals village-wide: https://www.fcc.gov/general/jammer-enforcement

I should be rather surprised if the FCC were the relevant body in Wales.

I was curious so I looked up UKs regulations. The phrasing that UK’s regulatory authority uses regarding interference is very similar to the FCCs part 15 regulations.

> Anyone using electrical apparatus is responsible for ensuring that it does not cause harmful interference to others. If this happens, we may require the user to rectify the situation.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/spectrum/interference-enforcement

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#80

Post by donalhunt » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 11:18 AM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #34

bayindirh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pr…

I can guarantee that the customer reports came in as "my broadband isn't working again this morning...". And that's for the customers who called in.

Unless you had 50+% of the village calling up every morning for a week, it would not have been identified as a cluster event (and I suspect many ops orgs don't have the means to identify clusters anyway).