Friend of mine in Toronto told me a story how a CRTC (canadian telcom/radio regulator aka like the US FCC) tech was walking around his apt bldg with a spectrum analyzer. Pin pointed an apartment down the hall and was able to make contact and remove the offending device that was bleeding into mobile frequencies. Was a Chinese manufactured baby monitor that was interfering with mobile service. Said they had this problem all over the country with shoddy imports.
Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
231–240 of 304 posts
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#232Earlier 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…
Many midwest small cities. In the Des Moines area you can get all that within an easy biking distance of costco.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#233Some 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-…
> 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.
Being ignorant in this area, I am rather curious now: What exactly was your error, and how did it interfere with the TVs? Did the sink pipe become part of your antenna because of it's size, thus turning what you thought was a tiny antenna into a massive antenna with orders of magnitude more gain than you thought? Did you connecting your antenna to the piping end up dumping a bunch of noise into the electrical grounds of the hotel's wiring, enough to mess up the demodulation circuits in the hotels? Something else?
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#234I 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…
Send Comcast a bill for your services.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not deliberately. The neutral from the Power co. failed, then his house power sought out another pathway. The coax was grounded to the house's service ground (as it should be), and became a return path for the electric his house was using.
> his house power sought out another pathway Pedantically (but with the justification that this is safety-critical): Electricity always takes every path , just in inverse proportion to the impedance of the paths. If a fleshy 1000 ohm resistor touched that service ground, you'd get some electrons there too, and possibly enough to kill.
>Electricity always takes every path, just in inverse proportion to the impedance of the paths
This is one of those things that are bloody obvious in retrospect, but people usually don't think about it at all
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#236Earlier 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
The only thing to break the duopoly is some third option that requires no additional last mile infrastructure investment - either a common infrastructure that decouples provider from physical wiring or wireless Internet that isn't horrible.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#237I had a buddy who had this happening in rural vermont. He had to get a signal analyzer because nobody believed him and eventually he got the FCC involved which finally got the thing shut off.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#238I 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…
Five years ago (assuming you weren't exaggerating) the house builder chose not to bother calling Openreach about the new homes they were building. They chose to wait until the last minute and then say "We're a house builder, just put up a few new houses, so connect them to a phone line for us OK?" If they instead engage at the outset, Openreach says OK, you need to put in ducting to run fibre to each house from the s…
Yep but you'll need a time machine as you will need to contact BT for the new phone line 5 years before you know you are going to start building the house to be on the safe side. I know of plenty of people who tried to organise their phone line before they started their build and have moved in and are still waiting for a phone line 6 months later. It's the same with all utilities in the UK; totally chaotic constantly changing bureaucracy. You have to know the secret telephone number to call to get someone who is not working in a general call centre. Even then it's surprising how often they don't seem to know the procedure for getting a new house connected.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#239Like clockwork at 7? Seems impossible. Who turns on their tv exactly at 7.00 every day? Something does not add up here.
Why it seems impossible? If you're a fan of a show that starts at 7:00 every day but you don't care about other shows before that, you'd end up in that pattern. Even without watching scheduled TV, if you have a normal day things usually follow the same pattern. Finish work at 17:00, arrive home at 17:30 and all chores done by 19:00, time to watch TV! Doesn't seem too impossible.
7am, not 7pm, so I'd go with morning news or weather, rather than a scheduled TV show.
Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that electricity has unintuitive behaviour though it is trustworthy, at least as far as you would trust a water system, if one understands why electricity doesn’t behave the same as water.
You can see water. It's a lot less potentially lethal, too. I understand how electricity works well enough to handle it safely - and, at least as important, to know when I can't handle it safely and it's time to call in a professional - but that's not the same as trusting it. Honestly, it's a lot more the same as not trusting it. I can and do prototype line-voltage filament LED lamp designs on my bench without a prob…
> All anyone has to do is screw up wiring an appliance with exposed metal parts, and the whole thing can be live at potentially lethal mains voltage
Or for extra fun, the wiring in the house. Lots of people think things like changing a plug are "easy" (they are), but they're also really easy to screw up.
Now you don't need some DIY'd appliance. Your Ikea stuff is now potentially deadly.
The number of DIY jobs I've run across where the hot/neutral are reversed on the plugs... It's insidious because for all intents and purposes it will _work_. Nothing you plug in will have any issues.
But that nice shiny metal lamp you've got? It's got the neutral bonded to the body so that if the hot were to come loose and contact the body it has a path to ground. What happens when the neutral and hot are reversed? The body of your lamp is now live, and when it's off it has no path to ground. Wear rubber shoes when you're turning your lamp on and off.
Your toaster? It only switches the hot. So when your toast is done and you stick your metal knife all up in there to try and dig your toast out, it's all still live with no path to ground. Whoops.
A lot of assumptions that are essential to things being safe all fall apart as soon as someone puts those black wires under the silver screws.