Earlier quoted context omitted.
Be sure to write specifically for your target audience. That clickbait would work if your target was the Lowest Common Denominator. It doesn't work so well with a highly technical audience.
[deleted]
[deleted]
Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
171–180 of 304 posts
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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). Mostly true, I believe Virgin put their own cables in the ground, and younger companies like hyperoptic.
More or less, but Virgin inherited most of their legacy fibre from the likes of Telewest, NTL / Cable & Wireess, Vidoetron, & Cable London. These days the Virgin name is just about brand recognition.
I’m not sure what your point is?
They still manage their own infrastructure regardless what their company name is. They don’t use another supplier like openreach for their infra which was my point.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#173Earlier 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?
Utility markets are anything but free. They're locally sanctioned monopolies or duopolies.
They are a good example of why government running things is generally a bad idea.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Maybe on a massive development they will install brand new street cabinets
Street cabinets would be FTTC. The cabinet is full of electronics, for FFTC there's a full VDSL modem which is you can feel and hear a working FTTC cabinet, it gets hot, so it has cooling fans that spew warm air and makes a gentle buzzing noise.
For FTTP they can and do either just bury everything (in a city or where the cables are underground for tidiness) or hang it from a pole if there are telegraph poles in your area. Because there's very little of consequence near you, the smarts are all in an exchange building that might be a full day's walk from you rather than street cabinets typically just a few hundred metres from each property.
> anything smaller than a few hundred homes, copper is still the standard.
If you're building twenty properties the fibre is free if the builder asks. Nothing to pay, just so long as you get Openreach in at the start to ensure a viable deployment.
If you're building between two and nineteen properties it's cost sharing, the builder pays part of the extra install cost over copper for their smaller site.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#175Earlier 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?
Don't let the fact that it's incorporated as a private business fool you, Comcast is a government monopoly. A deregulated ISP market would be a huge improvement for this country!
But how would the gov't handle installing all the back-doors?
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#176Earlier 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…
> Ah, no. SNR problems in the shared medium is not something wathced or logged. A good ISP definitely does monitor SNR. It's a basic metric available from each individual customer device.
> It's a basic metric available from each individual customer device.
Not mine. Good luck accessing to the modem you provided which I reconfigured to be a dumb bridge and terminated the ADSL connection on my router. Oh, the router neither see the POTS line (it only gets Ethernet) nor have remove management capabilities.
Where endpoints are heterogeneous, there's guaranteed, real fun (Even more so if you make assumptions).
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's more that the cable line was connected to the home's ground plate which the neutral was also tied to (neutral is tied to ground so it can discharge excess current in the home's electrical system during thunderstorms or power surges). When the neutral was cut on the service line, the return path for the mains current became residential ground->cable line->neutral in cable trunk. Since coax drops aren't designed t…
I’m honestly surprised the low voltage cable lasted as long as it did.
I'm surprised too, but depending on what equipment is in the house the neutral can see much less current than the hot. US residential is usually split phase power, so 240 is provided by two out of phase 120 wires. Since most large loads (air conditioner, stove, oven, etc) use 240v they don't put a load on the neutral. The 120v devices put a load on the neutral but if the house is well wired they cancel each other out since half are on one leg of the 120 and half on the other. From the power service view they act like one large 240v device.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#178I 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…
That's an incredible story!
It's amazing what you can discover when you start back-tracing issues like this.
A few months ago, my house started having intermittent failures.
It turns out that some road works caused one of the phases in my house to leak into the other phase, which caused a whole array of problems, but only in specific areas of the house.
We discovered this by piping 40kV into the wiring and listening to crackling in the ground, where we found the faulty cabling.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's more that the cable line was connected to the home's ground plate which the neutral was also tied to (neutral is tied to ground so it can discharge excess current in the home's electrical system during thunderstorms or power surges). When the neutral was cut on the service line, the return path for the mains current became residential ground->cable line->neutral in cable trunk. Since coax drops aren't designed t…
I’m honestly surprised the low voltage cable lasted as long as it did.
[deleted]
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Utility markets are anything but free. They're locally sanctioned monopolies or duopolies.
They are a good example of why government running things is generally a bad idea.
Regulating an industry is not the same as running it. For an industry to truly not be regulated, it needs to exist in an imaginary space, perhaps next door to physicsland with its frictionless surfaces and spherical cows.
At present the only example of governments running - or at least owning - communications utilities in the United States that I'm aware of are municipal broadband [1] providers, which tend to be much more well-liked by their users than something like Comcast. (and bitterly opposed by The High Priests of The Invisible Hand, who want competition but not that competition)
Of course, other countries have state-owned communications monopolies, which actually run the gamut in terms of quality and cost.