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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

#241

Post by bArray »

> After 18 months engineers began an investigation after a

> cable replacement programme failed to fix the issue.

That sounds like the typical runaround you'll get from network engineers in the UK. It's shameful that an entire village was without proper internet for 18 months. You might think "what does it matter", but remember people run internet businesses or keep in touch with family & friends. Imagine how bad this situation would be for folks during COVID.

For myself the internet used to go down for days at a time, perhaps every couple of weeks. We had BT of speed-dial and knew how to get through the bot automation by mashing the keypad. For maybe 5 years we asked for this to be repaired and got the usual "it must be your system" or "unusually high traffic" - sometimes they would send an engineer down to try and sell us some hardware we didn't need. We even got a business line, but BT couldn't keep that going either.

Eventually we even started collecting signatures of local people willing to buy a fiber internet connection if we paid for one to be fitted and pretty much everybody backed it. Initially we were only asking local businesses, but the demand was high from everywhere. We only needed something like 10% of users to buy in to cover the original costs. After this BT was suddenly motivated to fit fiber and because of the preparations we had begun to make, it was fitted just outside our house.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#242

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

milankragujevic wrote: post #38
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.

BT openreach mainly does DSL and FTTH, AFAIK. edit: Just to clarify, FTTH is by definition a shared medium, but the huge capacity in practice means that there is little congestion usually. Also, since glass fiber is a dielectric, it is difficult to get noise in the signal, and it is immune to EMI. DSL is by definition a dedicated medium, having a twisted pair wire from the DSLAM at the central office or street cabine…

By that you mean GPON, I guess? Not so here, where it is PTP. And an ISP with excellent peering.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#243

Post by tialaramex »

sippingjippers wrote: post #71
tialaramex wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Openreach certainly are interested in converting homes from EO to a street cabinet and have done this many times, but that's little comfort to you because they haven't done yours yet. In some cases Openreach converts from EO to FTTP, so you go from only having very poor ADSL2 available to 300Mbps or better available over fibre.

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…

The returns are indeed diminishing. But in a multi-person household I can totally buy that 20Mbps just doesn't feel like enough. If one of you is doing a big download and then two more try to watch Netflix, that's going to suck. Some of this is made worse because of Buffer Bloat (which you should cure), but ultimately 20Mbps won't stretch very far in a typical 3-4 person household, and some British homes have half a dozen or more Internet users (a newborn isn't using the Internet, but both a toddler watching a cartoon and grandma catching up with old friends on Zoom are).

Also in practice the same services (even if with different branding) are offered to small businesses. If you can't afford to lease serious offer space that might come with dedicated fibre you'll be buying whatever the fastest broadband available to consumers is, and maybe paying extra for it. So if the best available was 20Mbps that's going to suck for an office of twenty people.

So I'm comfortable with plans that say (a) it makes sense to deploy fibre where you're going from scratch and (b) it makes sense to offer 1Gbps where practical even if most of your price sensitive customers are happy at more like 50Mbps. My scepticism is reserved for people who insist that (a) anything less than fibre to every home is a betrayal and (b) everybody "needs" gigabit or better because this will enable some mythical yet-to-be invented new service that justifies the excess.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#244

Post by jdeibele »

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…

We were about to leave for vacation in August. The night before we left, the power went off, then came back on. This happened 1, 2, 3, 20 times. I switched off the main breaker and then went outside to see if I could find out what was going on. Nobody was outside and it was hard to tell if other homes had electricity - a lot of people were gone on vacation themselves and it was still bright.

I tried calling electricians but couldn't get anybody out quickly enough so I ended up calling the power company. They dispatched a guy with a small truck with a short cherry-picker.

He was able to diagnose the problem as branches rubbing on the power line. He trimmed around it so I could turn the power back on. Our house was built in 1914 and the tree wasn't there. Somewhere over 100 years the tree in our neighbor's yard was planted and grew large enough to interfere with the power line.

While we were gone the power company replaced the connection with a shorter, more direct line that avoided the tree entirely.

As another poster said, I think your story is better because of your diagnosing the problem yourself.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#245

Post by mannykannot »

xenadu02 wrote: post #53
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.

It says they did a cable replacement. I suspect that took some time and they thought it would resolve the problem. They were probably quite surprised when it didn't.

I guess someone who thinks 'fixing' a problem, without finding out what is causing it, has a high probability of success, would be surprised when it did not work. They are probably surprised every time it doesn't work.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#246

Post by hannasanarion »

bluGill wrote: post #218
hannasanarion wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

And what, you think it's a complete coincidence that every single city in broad swaths of the country decided to contract with a single company to run those wires?

No, agreements between the companies ensure that only one option is available to each region. My city can offer Time Warner the right to run cable here whenever they want, but Time Warner will refuse to do so, because Time Warner has a deal with Comcast that says they will never offer cable in my city. There is no legal barrier to new cable startups like Google Fiber, only the immense cost of it and the threat of retaliatory blacklisting and throttling from the cable monopolies.

That's why the only places these companies compete are ones where the cities have decided to set up a local public broadband to buck the monopoly, or a very well resourced competitor like Google has decided to enter the market and refuses to play their anticompetition game.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#247

Post by milankragujevic »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #242
milankragujevic wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BT openreach mainly does DSL and FTTH, AFAIK. edit: Just to clarify, FTTH is by definition a shared medium, but the huge capacity in practice means that there is little congestion usually. Also, since glass fiber is a dielectric, it is difficult to get noise in the signal, and it is immune to EMI. DSL is by definition a dedicated medium, having a twisted pair wire from the DSLAM at the central office or street cabine…

By that you mean GPON, I guess? Not so here, where it is PTP. And an ISP with excellent peering.

Edit: disregard my comment, I mistook PTP to mean Ethernet while in reality it's Point to point Fiber. In any case my point about noise still stands. But PTP Fiber is really rare in the world, given how many people are stuck on coax.

Yes, with FTTH (or FTTP) I meant GPON. Refarding PTP, do you mean a residential ethernet network? (Technically FTTB, copper / ethernet to the premises)

Branding anything other than FTTH as "Fiber" is misleading.

It's like saying DOCSIS 3.0 is Fiber because its a Hybrid Fiber-Coaxial network, while in reality all cable internet networks are HFC, the difference is the number of nodes serviced by a CMTS, which when reduced by a node split will result in higher speeds and more capacity.

Or saying DSL is "Fiber" because uplink to the DSLAM is Fiber. All DSLAM uplinks are Fiber, difference is how many street cabinets are there because DSL speed is dictated by the local loop length, and with more street cabinets there is higher chance one gets built closer to you enabling you faster speeds.

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#249

Post by TT3351 »

Scoundreller wrote: post #184
gpuhacker wrote: post #48

I love these kind of stories. At Astron, the institute that builds and operates radio telescopes in the Netherlands, there's a story that they once gave a new TV to someone who lived a couple of villages from one of the telescopes, because the old set was causing too much radio interference. They could figure out the exact location of the old TV based on the data from the radio telescope

Then there’s a group of observant Jews that’ll sometimes drop by and kindly come by and fix your fence for free if it’s a part of their eruv, possibly before you know it’s broken https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-invisible-and-often...

Fascinating reading about the agony of requesting permission to string the line; I would be surprised if the practitioners who established NYC's eruv jumped through the same hoops. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-manhattan-eruv-new-y...

Re: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

#250

Post by jhoechtl »

I am a fan of old portable radios. Early radios of that time didn't come with a power supply, you had to power them with batteries. I do not want to use batteries yet pretty mich every power supply I use these days causes either bad rf via the device itself feeding into the antenna or via the power wire. Any advice for a stable low-cost stabilized dc swotching power supply which does not exhibit this terrible behaviour?
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