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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

#131

Post by nottorp »

bayindirh wrote: post #23
nottorp wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Yeah, funny how ISPs in rich countries can't afford infrastructure upgrades. Yeah, you're right. I'm writing my answers with pure naivety. There's also "Meh, we're earning enough money, no need to make customers happier" mentality which I find really, really wrong.

Oh no. They never feel they're earning enough money. But they can just add another unjustified fee to your bill whenever they feel like it to increase profits :)

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#132

Post by bluGill »

justin66 wrote: post #118
newsbinator wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Comcast wouldn't be able to send anyone out for a month Is there a good explanation for how this can be the case in a developed country?

The invisible hand of the free market did not want anyone there for a month. We all follow the invisible hand (like, instinctively, since it's invisible). You're not questioning the wisdom of the invisible hand, are you?

you can't blame the free market when comcast has a state sponsored monopoly/duopoly (with the telephone company being the other) on fast internet.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#133

Post by memsom »

stoobs wrote: post #62
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.

Short answer - it's BT. From personal experience it probably took most of that time to escalate the issue high enough for someone to take it seriously, then a few visits to get the right people onsite. It would have probably been quicker to migrate the village to FTTP

No it is worse than that, it is Openreach. BT spun them off, and they are not the same company anymore - this was to avoid being told they had a monopoly on the lines. But in truth, BT get a lot more priority with Openreach than any other provider, but the quality of the service Openreach provides is inadequate at best anyway.

Relevant story - we moved in to a new build and waited 3 months to get ADSL. Not anything fancy, just plain old ADSL. The provider we went with was Talk Talk, and they basically had to go to Openreach and ask them to sort out the issue (turned out to be something to do with over capacity at the exchange.) This dragged on for months. I spent hours on the phone talking to someone in India, who then talked to someone in the UK who then got on to Openreach. It was a wholly terrible experience. I finally lost my proverbial s??t and complained directly to Openreach (and believe it or not actually got a response with the real reason for the delay - some infrastructure through which caballing went through had collapsed and they needed to schedule it to be fixed, but as it was under a dual carriage way, that was taking some time. Still possibly a lie, but better than the nonsense I was getting from the guy in India.) So as they had been lying to me constantly, I gave up and cancelled the contract, and we went with BT instead because we could then use the FON wireless of our neighbours in the interim. Well, one week later the ADSL came on. This was at least 2 weeks before it was scheduled by Openreach and BT, who were aware of the issue. So all we can assume is someone magically fixed it. To this day I don't know if BT and Openreach had some special relationship or if we were just lucky and BT juggled something in the exchange, but - yeah, 4 years later we have cruddy ADSL still, and no Fibre or Cable.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#134

Post by smichel17 »

ethanwillis wrote: post #93

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…

Just FYI, I really enjoyed your story but I almost closed the tab and didn't read it due to "Read on to find out" in the first paragraph. It sets off all the clickbait alarms in my head, which make me expect to find a bunch of low-quality content. The rj45 cable melting is just as good of a hook (and is actually why I continued reading). I'd suggest sticking the first sentence onto the front of the second paragraph and removing the rest of the first paragraph.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#135

Post by throwaway0a5e »

justin66 wrote: post #118
newsbinator wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Comcast wouldn't be able to send anyone out for a month Is there a good explanation for how this can be the case in a developed country?

The invisible hand of the free market did not want anyone there for a month. We all follow the invisible hand (like, instinctively, since it's invisible). You're not questioning the wisdom of the invisible hand, are you?

Utility markets are anything but free. They're locally sanctioned monopolies or duopolies.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#136

Post by ethanwillis »

smichel17 wrote: post #134
ethanwillis wrote: post #93

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…

Just FYI, I really enjoyed your story but I almost closed the tab and didn't read it due to "Read on to find out" in the first paragraph. It sets off all the clickbait alarms in my head, which make me expect to find a bunch of low-quality content. The rj45 cable melting is just as good of a hook (and is actually why I continued reading). I'd suggest sticking the first sentence onto the front of the second paragraph a…

Thanks for that feedback. I'm having to do a lot more writing for my job now so being able to improve my writing with honest feedback is super important.

I agree, I even cringed a little bit when I wrote it. But I didn't want to fully give everything away so it was just a bad edit :) Your suggestion would work a lot better.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#137

Post by mercora »

cm2187 wrote: post #101

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.

are you really sure the problem was caused by the TV and not just exposed by it?

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#139

Post by justin66 »

bluGill wrote: post #132
justin66 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The invisible hand of the free market did not want anyone there for a month. We all follow the invisible hand (like, instinctively, since it's invisible). You're not questioning the wisdom of the invisible hand, are you?

you can't blame the free market when comcast has a state sponsored monopoly/duopoly (with the telephone company being the other) on fast internet.

You can blame The High Priests of The Invisible Hand for keeping the members of the duopolies astonishingly poorly regulated, to go back to the original point of the grandparent post.

As an aside, it's funny, I'm not sure what qualifies for me as "the telephone company" anymore. I guess there probably is one where I live, technically, but it doesn't seem to factor in.

edit: this is evidently going to be one of those posts that fluctuates in "points" over time, bouncing up and down. It'd be fun to have a sparkline implementation that illustrates this change over time

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#140

Post by jve »

andybak wrote: post #65
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 probably takes 18 months to get a support case escalated to the point where a real engineer looks at it.

Probably. From the wording in article they BEGAN solving the issue after 18 months. But then, it was only after some cable has been replaced - that could have taken a while to plan, budget and actually do, then again collect feedback.

> After 18 months engineers began an investigation after a cable replacement programme failed to fix the issue.

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