Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months • Hacker News Board

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#191

Post by justin66 » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #142

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?

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!

A system where large corporations handle the backbone and local ISPs and/or municipalities handle the last few miles sounds ideal for the US, but I am pretty skeptical as to whether we would get that if regulations simply ceased to exist.

("regulations simply cease to exist" seems like the casual definition for "deregulation," though the actual process of deregulation is for a bunch of people to pass a new set of regulations and if they're pandering to a certain constituency, they will call it "deregulation," regardless of the effect of the regulations they just passed. See: telecom, the airlines, banking, etc.)

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#192

Post by drdeadringer » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

ShradhaSingh wrote: post #138

I want to know why peoples are paying high for OLD TV's these days. Whats in there?

I wanted to own a Videosphere, but then again I'm not everybody.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#193

Post by toast0 » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

mcny wrote: post #95

sippingjippers wrote: post #71

Earlier 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…

I notice your list doesn't include a decent commute to work. You can probably find somewhere in washington state that meets that, although for cheap land, you'll need to avoid population centers. And you'll need to pick a lot carefully. Electric coverage is pretty complete on paved roads, but water, sewage, and fiber networks aren't guaranteed.

Well and septic isn't too bad, if the system is well built and the lot is appropriate (well needs an aquifer, septic needs a big enough flat patch and appropriate soils).

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#194

Post by C1sc0cat » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 2:33 PM UTC

saltspork wrote: post #116

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…

Open neutrals are no joke, here’s a good analysis of a similar situation that caused a house fire: https://www.electrical-forensics.com/Open-Neutral/Open-Neutr... Here in Australia the coax connection from the street typically goes through a galvanic isolator to avoid this situation, rather than being bonded to the earth.

Wow what a mess

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#195

Post by tialaramex » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

iso1631 wrote: post #43

bayindirh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're running network over coax alongside cable TV, it's shared medium. I'm not in the UK or US though, so regardless of their name, every ISP is equal and is indeed a bog standard ISP from my vantage point.

Cable TV? Coax? Most of the UK, especially outside of large towns, is 1) Twisted pair to the cabinet then Twisted pair to the exchange ("Normal DSL", ADSL) 2) Twisted pair to the cabinet then Fibre to the exchange ("Fibre broadband", FTTC) 3) Fibre to the cabinet then Fibre to the exchange (FTTP) Cable TV is a minority thing in the UK, maybe 20% of TV owning households, compared with 50% on satelite of some sort, and…

> 3) Fibre to the cabinet then Fibre to the exchange (FTTP)

FTTP doesn't bother going to a cabinet at all since there would be nothing interesting for it to do there. GPON splitters are low maintenance and so you can just throw one up on a telegraph pole or bury it.

Yes this means that an era of street cabinets gives way to an era in which it's just telegraph poles or the network infrastructure disappears entirely, buried in the street.

> Cable TV is a minority thing in the UK, maybe 20% of TV owning households.

This may well be, however over 50% of UK households could buy their Internet service from Virgin (the Cable TV company) and get DOCSIS over that coaxial cable, they needn't choose to buy television service (although of course Virgin would like them to do so)

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#196

Post by tialaramex » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 3:01 PM UTC

JosephRedfern wrote: post #124

crote wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it isn't! While commercial fiber is usually point-to-point, consumer-grade fiber commonly uses a Passive Optical Network. Basically, a single fiber is split to multiple devices, and the upstream device allocates time slots to devices in which they can transmit. Just like what's happening with cable internet. This means that, theoretically, a rogue end-user device could ignore the timeslot allocation and dis…

Wow, that sounds like a crazy vulnerability... so could I shine a laser pointer (of the right wavelength) down a FTTH optical fibre, screw up the TDMA, and knock out network access for my village? EDIT: my understanding isn't great here, but could I also listen outside of my time window and snoop on other traffic?

The GPON splitter is entirely passive, it's effectively a very fancy prism, so yes. It's a shared network. So is the road. You could just pour barrels of something nasty across the big road into the village and snarl everything up, but when they catch you I'm guessing the other villagers will be pretty unhappy about that.

In principle the technology might arrange for encryption keys between your endpoint and the smarts at a remote exchange so that it's impossible without physical access to another terminal to interpret messages for other terminals or impersonate them. In practice I doubt this is actually effective.

You should assume that traffic you send may be intercepted by an adversary. If you're confident that you don't have any adversaries then I suppose that needn't concern you, otherwise you should probably put most confidence in security at layers you can actually inspect, like TLS/ HTTPS rather than mysterious proprietary technologies like your FTTP installation.

There are standards for stuff like the encryption of GPON, but those standards aren't for implementing by us, so they leave lots of gaps that could be filled by your service provider with strong, security focused decision making, or could be "Eh, who cares just set the password as 'password' on all the terminals and stop fiddling with it". It doesn't take too much cynicism to assume the latter.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#197

Post by kilotaras » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 3:02 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #142

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?

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!

ISPs are a natural monopoly [1]. Deregulation is unlikely to fix the issue. Creating (or regulating) a common infrastructure, e.g. poles and/or cable tunnels looks like a better way to induce competition.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#198

Post by C1sc0cat » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 3:06 PM UTC

mellosouls wrote: post #61

The embarrassed householder promised not to use the television again. I hope the cable company bought the "mortified" TV owner (possibly old/poor) a new TV because they've done nothing obviously wrong.

Operating "an illegal radiator" maybe - that I believe is the technical term.

I think from a comment on the El Reg version of the story its the BBC that has jurisdiction - id have thought it was Ofcom my self.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#199

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 3:06 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #142

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?

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!

[deleted]

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#200

Post by awalton » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 3:06 PM UTC

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.

> 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.

You say that, but the San Antonio Caltrain to California Avenue Caltrain stretch still has an enormous T-Mobile deadzone, even after I twice reported it to them and both times they said "they'd send someone to take a look."