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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

#201

Post by hannasanarion »

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.

"state sponsored" only in the sense that the state hasn't stepped in to break them up. Comcast's monopoly is entirely self-created through mergers and non-competition agreements.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#202

Post by C1sc0cat »

grandinj wrote: post #149

We sell gear to find these kinds of issues. The best story so far, was a little old lady with an ancient table-side lamp, which had a faulty connection, which would sometimes arc, with just the right shape of wire attached to it to broadcast noise all over the GSM bands. Now GSM is (from the perspective of the phone's broadcasts), pretty weak, so that enough to periodically wipe out cell service for a couple of neigh…

I have heard - possibly apocryphal about intermittent interference coming from a budgie swing.

The Engineer only noticed this when the little old lady offered him a cuppa and he saw the budgie swing away.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#203

Post by wtracy »

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!

Exactly what regulations are preventing new broadband providers from entering the market?

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#204

Post by unnouinceput »

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.

Here is your explanation. They didn't care.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#205

Post by kayfox »

newsbinator wrote: post #111
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…

> 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?

It requires a line tech and not an install tech. I don't know why it takes 3 months instead of like a week, but things can get bad when your choices for high speed internet are the phone company or the cable company and they both suck.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#206

Post by larrydag »

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…

Yes. Severed neutral lines are bad. A tree next to the house had eventually worn down the neutral line into our house and severed it. We heard buzzing and saw smoke in the house. Fortunately all the was burnt was an extension bar. It could have been a lot worse.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#207

Post by iso1631 »

memsom wrote: post #122
watermanio wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is our situation too. What makes it worse is we have Cable in the area too, but that stops on the public street, and doesn't come on to the estate. We were looking to move recently and almost bought a house from a sub company of Persimmons (yeah, we pulled out after we found out they were involved), but the houses all had Fibre to the premises. Except the provider was a monopoly, and was owned by Persimmons. App…

There are all sorts of problems with houses built in say the last 10-15 years. The leasehold scam has headlines, but even freeholds come with things like 'estate charges' and 'management companies', which mean that nearby public spaces (open areas, playgrounds etc) are owned by a private company, and that company can charge whatever they want to house owners, without even giving them a breakdown of the costs! Note these are public facilities open to everyone, not just residents.

Half the time the roads aren't even maintained by the council, but there's no rebate on council tax.

But I have to admit this is a new one on me.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#208

Post by hyperdimension »

arnon wrote: post #178
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…

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…

I'm very intrigued--can I get any more details about how you could safely do that? Did you, e.g. disconnect the main breaker and have a spare Van de Graaff generator lying around?

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#209

Post by sgt101 »

ricardo81 wrote: post #91
cs02rm0 wrote: post #33

I naively thought this was going to be somewhere like rural India, not the UK (albeit relatively rural Wales). I'm forever calling out engineers because the line crackles to the point it's difficult to take a call and my internet speed drops from ~65Mbps to ~10. Maybe I should start looking for old TVs. Somehow, being on a road where the houses were only built 5 years ago we have copper lines and on my side of the st…

Had an issue with line noise when I moved house. Took a while to figure out but apparently when it rained, I'd lose Internet connection. Took a bit of back and forth with British Telecom to convince them there's an issue after their continual "our tests indicate the line is OK"- if only they tested it when it was raining here! Line got replaced, apparently it was 60 years old. Worked a charm since.

The magic words are "the line is crackly when I try to hear someone" which will be recorded as "interference" and cause and engineer to be sent out. Then get them to open up any junction boxes that you can see. Normally the problem is that one of these has leaked causing poor coupling.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#210

Post by aidenn0 »

newsbinator wrote: post #111
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…

> 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?

Comcast has, on occasion, ranked below the IRS in terms of brand popularity...
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