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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

#211

Post by sgt101 »

secondcoming wrote: post #166
dan1234 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my street, my house is one of 4 connected directly to the exchange instead of a cabinet, which means I can't get fibre (only FTTC is available here). BT/Openreach/Whoever aren't interested in changing this, but luckily I can get Virgin Media (overpriced IMO, but better than the 20Mb alternative).

Do you need fibre at all? I recently moved and didn't bother with it. Instead I'm using a 4G unlimited data SIM from Vodafone in a Huawei 4G/5G router. The speeds are normally around 80Mbps. I have no complaints whatsoever.

There are two problems - coverage (trees, other houses ect get in the way) which means that for some places it's fine, for other places no good, and contention. In 5G the bearer (radio frequencies) is very well managed and I am 50/50 thinking that realistically contention will be ok for large scale consumption. But... ultimately, you have one set of radio between everyone whereas everyone has a fibre... (this is not quite true due to GPON but sorta!)

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#212

Post by sgt101 »

memsom wrote: post #133
stoobs wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

You get what you pay for from Openreach - or more precisely the service provider pays little, and tells you it's Openreach while you pay lots.

Sky and BT retail definitely pay for the top options of services.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#213

Post by cheese_van »

Some many years ago, I was the source of interference.

Newly hired by a federal employer who considered morse code an asset, I practiced in my hotel room. Bored, I decided to go live with a small tune-able antenna inside my hotel room, ground to a sink pipe. Yes, I was an idiot, and still am, but older and wiser.

Anyway, every time I keyed, every television in the hotel went green in sync with my keying. Green-green-green. Green green.

The cleaning lady ratted me out and I got a deserved earful from the hotel.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#214

Post by jdofaz »

JdeBP wrote: post #88

It's interesting comparing the stories on this from various sources. Sometimes M. Jones is an engineer for OpenReach; sometimes xe is an unspecified engineer. The television is sometimes "old"; sometimes "second-hand" (which doesn't necessarily mean old). Sometimes it is the householder who is old, referred to in some newspapers as an Old Age Pensioner. A few reports say things that the BBC does not, which have come…

Eye roll at their advice:

"We'd just advise the public to make sure that their electric appliances are properly certified and meet current British standards," she said.

"And if you have a fault, report it to your service provider in the first instance so that we can investigate."

It made me imagine the person going to buy an old tube tv on the black market and just laughing maniacally as it "faulted", whatever that means.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#215

Post by arnon »

hyperdimension wrote: post #208
arnon wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I obviously had help :)

I had an electrician come and perform this step. The house was disconnected from the source, and then a "thumper" was used: https://megger.com/portable-fault-location-system-stx40- 2000

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#216

Post by [deleted] »

bayindirh wrote: post #176
lima wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 assumpti…

[deleted]

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#217

Post by mturmon »

popotamonga wrote: post #155
LeonM wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not RF interference, but a phenomenon known as brownout [0]. When the fan spins up it draws more power, this causes the voltage to drop at the outlet, which causes the powersupply in the monitor to (temporarily) shut down. Normally, this shouldn't happen. So either the monitor is badly designed or old (the capacitors may have dried out), or you have a wiring issue in your house. The latter is a fire hazard. Yo…

Weird its a newish monitor 1 yr, also the pc is connected there and no issue. The one not usual thing is that they are all connected to a tplink powerline. ill try without the powerline.

Note to armchair troubleshooters nearby: It seems to be a passthrough connection from one of these:

https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/powerline/tl-pa70...

There are two types of fan motors, AC and DC. A lot of small fans would be DC fans, which have their own power supply/converter. Larger ceiling fans are often AC fans. Depending on where you are in the world, one or the other type might be common for some applications. In my experience, a small desktop fan would be a DC fan.

Both fan types have transient behavior at startup. It takes more energy to get the fan moving than to keep it moving. In principle, a basic fan looks something like a short circuit when the blades aren't turning.

This startup behavior manifests differently for AC vs DC fans. For more, here's a good summary showing steady-state current draw (figs. 3/4) and startup (fig. 5).

https://www.digikey.com/Web%20Export/Supplier%20Content/Coma...

Maybe the passthru connection on the TP-link doesn't like the inrush current demand -- and it's not the outlet itself.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#218

Post by bluGill »

hannasanarion wrote: post #201
bluGill wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, state sponsored - or more likely city sponsored. If you attempt to run wires around your neighborhood to provide TC, Telephone, and internet (you need to do all 3 to have a chance at making money) you will be shut down because Comcast already as an agreement with the city to not allow anyone else to do it.

I'm assuming a serious plan to run wires above. That is you have found deep packet backers to fund you; you have found qualified people to do the work; you have figured out all the other details to do this. There are good reasons to stop someone running cat-6 wires everywhere, but here I'm assuming you have figured out the right way to do this - whatever it is.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#219

Post by Nextgrid »

jayflux wrote: post #36
Nextgrid wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a hodge-podge of technologies, Microwave, FTTx, Wi-fi repeaters - and mixtures of those and more Most of which is being falsely advertised as fibre and peppered with bullshit marketing terms like "superfast" or "ultrafast" which means consumers have a very hard time comparing the different offers and understanding what they're actually getting.

> Most of which is being falsely advertised as fibre Last I checked If part of the journey is fibre (to the cabinet etc), they can legally advertise as fibre. They can’t advertise a service as fibre if non of the journey uses fibre. These days the advertisements need to make performance claims, so they can’t just say “it’s fibre” they need to say what speed you’ll get.

In this case wouldn't pretty much any technology qualify as eventually there would be fibre back at the datacenter, even in case of 56k dial-up?

Regardless of whether it's legal it is still a scummy thing to do and a major failure from the regulators. Calling crap like cable or DSL as "fibre" not only muddies the waters (DSL performance highly depends on wire quality, so one "fibre" might be 10x faster than your "fibre" despite them both being "fibre") and makes it super hard for people to know what they're actually getting.

When it comes to speeds, how is that determined considering DSL speeds are unknown until you actually try it (and by that time you're already in a contract)? Is it just a meaningless "up to " figure?

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#220

Post by rosswilson »

hyperdimension wrote: post #208
arnon wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's called Insulation Resistance Testing and an electrician would typically use a device like a Megger tester.

Here's a good video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsXUuuV4_sw

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