Nifty. And nifty that it was a solo pulse, not continuous. I wonder what the mechanism for that interference was?
Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
221–230 of 304 posts
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#222It'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…
Just imagine what happens with political stories.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Not to fight over terminology, but in most of the US, cable companies are given an explicit monopoly "franchise" from the local municipality.
There are some areas that might be a natural monopoly anyway due to low density population, but only way you could know is open things up. That's a tough pill to swallow since the franchise "fees" (taxes) are guaranteed so long as the cable company has a guaranteed monopoly. Yes they could pass a generic tax on cable service, but that would be a new tax.
I focus on cable companies because that seems to be the most common way to get broadband to many parts of the US.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#224This seems something that would happen only when using friggin old devices, but it happened with me using a brand new bluetooth headphone.
Everytime I had an online meeting, my broadband would go down. After the third time I called the telco, the tech guy who was inspecting the cables asked me about my bluetooth devices. He seemed really short of knowledge about computer networks and was just trying to fool me, so I told him I had nothing at home. Later I decided to turn off my headphone and the problem never showed up again.
Turns out you can't ignore empirical knowledge.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I think it's mostly that cities hand out monopolies to Comcast or regional equivalents.
I'll admit I don't know the details well.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
The electricity neutral for your home used the internet cable line? The amount of macguyvering to get that to work at all in the first place boggles the mind.
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 going to be honest: until my neutral line was severed by a tree falling on the line -- while not fully severing my power -- I thought the bare metal wire was just there to support the power lines physically.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#227Some 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-…
Do you ever imagine there was someone in the hotel who knew enough morse code to become paranoid that his TV was trying to relay secret messages to him?
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
You can make a decent natural monopoly argument for cabled ISPs. Still debatable, but it has some merit.
But in 2020, wireless ISP work great wherever they're not regulated away.
One big problem with regulations is that even if they're beneficial when enacted, they will remain in force for many decades after the underlying reality has changed.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the UK we call this a PEN conductor fault. It's called a PEN conductor when it's used as a combined Protective Earth & Neutral, as in a TN-C-S earthing arrangement. The property earthing is bonded to the incoming neutral cable before the consumer unit ("fuse board" / breaker panel). This relies on the fact that the neutral side of the supply transformer is itself earthed (this is why it's called neutral; its poten…
In a properly executed TN-C-S distribution, the TN-C and TN-S sections are separated with a 4 way single junction point where the PEN conductor coming from the station is connected to the local grounding rod and after this the separated PE and Neutral conductors are drawn into the property. Absolutely no circuit breaker is allowed on the PEN conductor upwards of this separation point. This arrangement remains safe re…
That would be safer, yeah, and I agree that's how it should be done. However, we don't do that.
Usually, our TN-C-S supplies are just augmented with PME, where the PEN conductor is earthed at multiple points along its run. This is almost equivalent to your description of a separate earth rod in every property, but it's on the main run instead of each branch, and it's not done for every point (e.g. house), nor even every other point or perhaps not even every 5 points.
This usually saves you from the consequences of a PEN conductor fault if it's broken along its run somewhere (because there's still an earth rod after the break), but it can't save you if the neutral is broken after it splits off to feed your property, and it can't save you if your property is the last on the line.
Where we have separate property earthing rods (either as the sole earthing arrangement, as in a TT earthing arrangement, or instead, in addition to a TN-S or TN-C-S supply, for example in an outbuilding containing extraneous conductive parts like copper water pipes), these are not permitted to be connected to a TN-C-S supply earth because practically no-one else in the street will have such a setup and then a broken PEN conductor sees your earth rod carry, perhaps, half of that street's supply current, which it could obviously never safely do.
I imagine we don't mandate supplementary earth rods in TN-C-S installations here because:
1) PME is common, reducing the impact of a PEN conductor fault, and
2) As I said, TN-C-S installations here use concentric cable, which is very hard to break in such a manner as to cause a PEN conductor fault without also killing the line conductor, rendering the fault moot.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#230Someone 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.
> 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…
This isn’t accurate. The amount of data available on a DOCSIS network is incredible. Per modem SNR, power levels, preEq data, etc. If the data is used properly it cans find a loose screw on a tap or a damaged cable down the the foot.
That being said impulse noise is one of the harder things to track down. If the modern tools don’t work most MSOs would end up doing the “unplug a leg and see if the SNR gets better” method until they found the offending house.