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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

#91

Post by ricardo81 »

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…

Had an issue with line noise when I moved house. Took a while to figure out but apparently when it rained, I'd lose Internet connection. Took a bit of back and forth with British Telecom to convince them there's an issue after their continual "our tests indicate the line is OK"- if only they tested it when it was raining here!

Line got replaced, apparently it was 60 years old. Worked a charm since.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#93

Post by ethanwillis »

I recently had my own host of cable internet issues.

So about 3 months ago the RJ45 cable in my cable modem melted. I thought it was a freak accident. I checked all of my networking equipment, checked my outlets, etc. No problems. So I installed a new cable and then everything was fine.

Cue 2 weeks ago. Connectivity became intermittent and then finally I had no internet for almost a week. Comcast wouldn't be able to send anyone out for a month. So I started digging around for the problem. A little over a year ago they sent out techs to work on my neighbors internet and in the process foolishly cut my coax. So I started from the cable tap and worked my way backwards.

There wasn't a continuity problem from what I could tell, no one either intentionally or unintentionally cut the cable. Then I look on the back of my house where the coax from the street is bonded to my home's grounding rod. Everything to the right of the bond was completely melted and still super hot. NOT GOOD.

So I did some testing of the bonding wire to the ground, the resistance was 37 ohms (should be much less than this). And there were no other electrical problems. My thought at the time was somehow power was being backfed from the cable tap to my home. So I removed the cable from the street and disconnected everything inside that was touch this cable.

Almost immediately I start getting voltage drops in my house, can't even run the microwave. That's when I realized what was really going on. The cable line was being used as a return path because the neutral for my neighborhood was at least partially severed.

It was so bad that if I increased voltage load in my home past a certain point then the streetlights in the front of my home would completely turn off.. Yes I could turn city infrastructure off and on by toggling the voltage load in my home.

The power company within a few hours had a crew come out to diagnose and fix the issue since it's actually potentially dangerous. They confirmed for me it was indeed a bad neutral. As soon as they replaced it I spliced my coax line, reconnected it, and everything worked perfectly.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#95

Post by mcny »

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…

Things are a little different When you have multiple people trying to work from home.

Even if a single connection is limited to 8Mbps a fatter pipe helps because you have more than one connection at any given time. Oh and fiber can do xMbps both ways I believe. Even Comcast gigabit is only 30Mbps up.

Where in the US can I get:

1. Cheap land to build a house

2. Under half an hour drive to Costco/sams club

3. Paved road to property

4. Water and sewage

5. Electricity

6. Fiber gigabit Internet

What else am I missing?

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#96

Post by dingaling »

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…

Buy yourself an RTL dongle and a wide-spectrum omnidirectional antenna and run a spectrum analyser when the problems recurs. That will get you the frequency, bandwidth and modulation of the interfering signal.

I'm dismayed but not surprised that Openreach in the linked example launched straight into replacing sections of cable. They don't seem to spend much time actually analysing a problem.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#97

Post by naz »

andi999 wrote: post #94

18 month? What were they doing? A spectrum analyser is standard equipment.

This is Openreach we're talking about. Everything happens in 6 month intervals. So those 18 months were likely: 6 months to realize there's a problem, 6 months to assign a contractor to the ticket, 6 months before their next availability for the job.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#98

Post by zimpenfish »

ricardo81 wrote: post #91
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…

Had an issue with line noise when I moved house. Took a while to figure out but apparently when it rained, I'd lose Internet connection. Took a bit of back and forth with British Telecom to convince them there's an issue after their continual "our tests indicate the line is OK"- if only they tested it when it was raining here! Line got replaced, apparently it was 60 years old. Worked a charm since.

Parents had the same issue with rain before they moved to fibre (which also barely works but eh, at least it barely works reliably.) Seems to be common enough that's it's trope-y.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#99

Post by rsynnott »

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 egregious example I've seen of this is Eir (formerly Eircom), the main Irish telco. They used to advertise some of their _ADSL_ as fibre! By this they meant the exchange had fibre backhaul; back in the day many exchanges had microwave backhaul, in some cases as low as 8Mbit/sec for a whole town.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#100

Post by gertrunde »

goldcd wrote: post #16
nottorp wrote: post #3

Fiber is immune to this kind of thing isn't it? So it's posssibly more of a story about the ISP being cheap.

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…

One of the more curious ones is FTTrN (Fibre to the Remote Node) - which is essentially a miniature VDSL DSLAM at the top of a telegraph pole. Well, that's how it started out - but it seems they're using it as a local node to run FTTP as well now - the only issue being that they want to run the fibre in the ground from the pole to the property, rather than taking the existing aerial route. (And that carries associated excess construction costs).

It has been popping up in quite a few villages in East Yorkshire due to being paid for by the county rural broadband fund.

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