I had something similar in my previous flat. The phone cable was going through the living room under the wooden floor, and passing right underneath my big plasma TV. Every time the TV would display a big white screen, the DSL would disconnect (you can imagine the experience of playing games online). Problem went away when I replaced it with an LED TV.
Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
101–110 of 304 posts
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#102I 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…
This is one of the most interesting and intriguing yet improbable stories I have ever read. Thanks for sharing.
I had a vanilla problem of power from neighbor's faulty set top box that was backfeeding into the cable network and killed my modem (and I think some other people's) one day.
I was told by the ISP's technician what had happened, I assumed the modem died by itself (i.e. bad OS) since it wouldn't fully turn on, only shows the power LED. In reality the tuner and some electronics probably died.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#103Earlier 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.
Not funny, but real: the price is a lot higher in rich countries than in poor countries. Fiber itself is almost dirt cheap, installing it makes a huge difference: in my area everybody hanged fiber to the existing light poles with almost no cost, it looks like a forest but you have fiber anywhere. If you want to dig and put fiber the cost is several orders of magnitude higher.
The company where my brother works linked 2 branches a few miles away with fiber almost 10 years ago for less than $1,000 in a single night in the middle of a capital city. Permits? No. Rent to the pole owners? No. This is how most of the city got 1 Gbps internet for ~ $10/month.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#104I 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…
The electricity neutral for your home used the internet cable line? The amount of macguyvering to get that to work at all in the first place boggles the mind.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#10518 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.
Thanks. Finding out by the 3rd appointment sounds about right ;-)
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 roa…
A considerable part of the Portland metro area has FTTP, and it extends into the semi-rural areas past eg wilsonville
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#107I 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
they did the same thing in west virginia with a heating pad.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 roa…
Chattanooga, Tennessee is the best bet right now, I believe. (Of course, depending on your definition of cheap land. But the internet bit is covered, and they have Sams).
Internet: https://epb.com/home-store/internet
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#109Fiber is immune to this kind of thing isn't it? So it's posssibly more of a story about the ISP being cheap.
In the UK we've got two levels: the ISPs (who don't put cable or fibre in the ground) and the network (who don't provide ISP services but do maintain the cables / fibre). In this example customers would have been calling their ISP to complain, and having to go through the layers of escalation. Also, it's a pretty remote location. Lots of rural areas in the UK have terrible Internet. I think this is the area in Google…
It's only a couple of miles down the road from Staylittle, "the village cut off from the web":
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-40108145
Either broadband is truly awful out that way (probably this, TBH) or one of the local Openreach engineers is related to a BBC news reporter...
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#110Earlier 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.
> running fiber to every home is not very wise, even for long term. Why not? Old copper will keep deteriorating and spending money repairing it is a waste. Fiber on the other hand is future-proof for the next ~50 years provided it's kept in good condition as you can increase bandwidth by upgrading equipment at both ends without replacing the actual glass.
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