Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 304 posts

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#81

Post by madengr »

fredley wrote: post #66
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

When's the last time you checked if any of your electronics were emitting a jamming signal?

I’m an amateur radio operator, so about 3 years ago, I spent the weekend going through the house getting rid of items that interfere with the HF spectrum. I found:

Two network switches, laptop power supply, dishwasher, streaming music device.

My receive antenna (active loop) is about 50 feet from the house. I’m still not satisfied with the interference levels, but it’s not coming from me.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#82

Post by unglaublich »

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.

Nor did the cable company, did they?

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#83

Post by mellosouls »

thinkloop wrote: post #68
fredley wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When's the last time you checked if any of your electronics were emitting a jamming signal?

Never, you? If I did though and found that one of my devices was harming my neighbors I wouldn't expect gifts.

It's not just that, its the way they have been made to feel they are at fault for using a device in good faith presumably for many years, with a news story plastered all over the world about how they've caused problems (even though they are - as yet - anonymous).

It's a funny story but sounds like a potentially harsh impact on them - and why should they just be told to stop using something with no alternative option presented?

Anyway, good PR for the company given the story has got traction.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#84

Post by encom »

popotamonga wrote: post #67

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

Back in Windows 98 times, I had bought a new halogen desk lamp. I put it on my desk, turned it on, and my machine promptly BSODed. It was reproducible as well. The switch on that lamp was effectively a "push here for BSOD" device.

What probably happened was high inrush current on the iron core transformer, and shitty 90s chinese power supply caused the opposite of a voltage spike, which I don't know the english term for.

The lamp became my bedside table lamp. A duty it serves to this day.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#85

Post by nitrogen »

sippingjippers wrote: post #71
tialaramex wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Where fast download speeds shine are software installations and updates on hard-wired devices. The less time I have to wait for updates before I can launch a game or app the better. In the US when I had fiber I would see Steam hit 80MB (megabytes) per second.

But the really important thing is upload speed. It shouldn't take ten minutes to upload a two minute video master to YouTube. Also off-site backups of large files would be nice, but is too slow over cable modem upload speeds.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#86

Post by donalhunt »

tialaramex wrote: post #49
kn100 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 op…

Many years ago when I was having cable modem issues, I used to scrape the SNMP off the modem and map stuff like that locally. Was very helpful when diagnosing issues with Level 1 support. "yes... it happens 20 times a day at these times..."

Since then the firmware on devices seems to have either dropped those types of features (cost reduction) or restricted them to an ISP-accessible interface ("security"). :(

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#87

Post by kube-system »

richardwhiuk wrote: post #78
heraclius wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The TV isn’t a jammer though, it’s a misbehaving device. Both Ofcom, the FCC, and most regulatory bodies handle intentional interference differently than accidental interference. You still aren’t supposed to operate misbehaving devices, but regulators generally realize you might not know your device is bad.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#88

Post by JdeBP »

It's interesting comparing the stories on this from various sources.

Sometimes M. Jones is an engineer for OpenReach; sometimes xe is an unspecified engineer.

The television is sometimes "old"; sometimes "second-hand" (which doesn't necessarily mean old).

Sometimes it is the householder who is old, referred to in some newspapers as an Old Age Pensioner.

A few reports say things that the BBC does not, which have come up in this discussion. The Wolverhampton Express and Star points out, for example, that Aberhosan is not on fibre yet.

* https://www.expressandstar.com/news/uk-news/2020/09/22/old-t...

And almost no-one acknowledges that this light-on-details story is light on details because they took it, word for word in some cases, from an OpenReach press release.

* https://www.openreach.com/news/second-hand-tv-wipes-out-broa...

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#89

Post by encom »

LeonM wrote: post #74
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. Yo…

Electrician here. Measure voltage at the outlet. It should be +/- 10% of nominal voltage. Eg. 207-253 in 230 volt land. You have to measure under load, so plug in some high current device. If voltage drops below 207 while a resistive heater is running, call somebody.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#90

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN