Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

1. You have an issue with your broadband in a rural area. You call up your ISP. You get some handwavy answer about contention and they ask you to restart your router and call them back if it happens again.

2. The next time they agree to have an engineer take a look. You hear nothing back. You contact them again, they say their engineer looked at the exchange and found no issues.

3. The next time you ring them and they agree to send an engineer to your house. The engineer (contracted out) arrives at 2pm, they check your modem, rant a bit off the record about how they don't fund shit, then determines that everything's working fine at 2pm, and it's the ISP's problem that their network collapses at 6pm because they oversold the rate of your village.

4. You contact the ISP. They read the engineer's report, saw it was working fine at 2pm, and decided they didn't need to take action. They suggest using the internet at another time of day, such as when you and most of your neighbours are away from the house and at work.

5. If enough people in the area decide they complain they might finally deign to do something about their service in a few months. More likely is some other ISP comes around and signs up all the customers so pissed off with the last one, until most of the village is now on this ISP and the same problems reocur.

6. After like 4 or so years you've looped through all the ISPs, maybe there's a new generation of tech which promises higher speeds but they can't be bothered funding anything locally so your actual speed and reliability is unchanged.

Also, CRTs render each scan line in real time whereas modern TVs have to receive all 480 lines before they can render a frame. This introduces a non-trivial amount of latency into the video feed which can make certain old games unpleasant to play.

This was certainly an issue with BT-OR in the UK for a short while when lock-down first properly started and there was a combination of OR people not being able to work and home users discovering issues (or reporting those that until now had been to minor to care about) as they tried to work from home. That caused quite a back-log of work in some areas.

Another one around same time same government building and was running Videoconferencing over 2Mbps circuits. Would get intermittent glitches - turned out the Q bearer for the line comming in was old and whilst other networking was fine running over that and the odd few bits messed up on networking could be retransmitted alas TCP/IP, for video, such hits stood out. Replaced that and worked lovely.

But weather related issue for networking would always be the go to, often heavy rain would mess up some microwave link or CAB unit and cause issues.

Another favourite was TZ spikes and had issue which saw call congestion around 3pm every day in the UK on these batch of modems - turned out that was when America woke up and would see a surge in calls, saturating/spiking the capacity for the telco provider and artificially capping our incoming call lines before we hit our capacity.

Then the seasonal ones like birds nesting or tree's growing or a tree ok but when the wind was north west over a certain speed it would blip between the microwave link - microwave links can be so much fun for the gotcha issues that can happen.