Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months
bbc.com
bbc.com
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 anyone out for a month. So I started digging around for the problem. A little over a year ago they sent out techs to work on my neighbors internet and in the process foolishly cut my coax. So I started from the cable tap and worked my way backwards.
There wasn't a continuity problem from what I could tell, no one either intentionally or unintentionally cut the cable. Then I look on the back of my house where the coax from the street is bonded to my home's grounding rod. Everything to the right of the bond was completely melted and still super hot. NOT GOOD.
So I did some testing of the bonding wire to the ground, the resistance was 37 ohms (should be much less than this). And there were no other electrical problems. My thought at the time was somehow power was being backfed from the cable tap to my home. So I removed the cable from the street and disconnected everything inside that was touch this cable.
Almost immediately I start getting voltage drops in my house, can't even run the microwave. That's when I realized what was really going on. The cable line was being used as a return path because the neutral for my neighborhood was at least partially severed.
It was so bad that if I increased voltage load in my home past a certain point then the streetlights in the front of my home would completely turn off.. Yes I could turn city infrastructure off and on by toggling the voltage load in my home.
The power company within a few hours had a crew come out to diagnose and fix the issue since it's actually potentially dangerous. They confirmed for me it was indeed a bad neutral. As soon as they replaced it I spliced my coax line, reconnected it, and everything worked perfectly.
I had a vanilla problem of power from neighbor's faulty set top box that was backfeeding into the cable network and killed my modem (and I think some other people's) one day.
I was told by the ISP's technician what had happened, I assumed the modem died by itself (i.e. bad OS) since it wouldn't fully turn on, only shows the power LED. In reality the tuner and some electronics probably died.
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 problem, but I think more than anything else it's maintaining a lively awareness of the danger involved that helps there not be a problem.
What's really scary is stuff that's as dangerous as those prototypes and doesn't look it - a condition that I think only ionizing radiation excels electricity in making it possible to create. 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 - and I'll freely admit that having had my batteries very unpleasantly charged that way once, thanks to a miswired ceiling fan, strongly informs my perspective on the subject.
As with fire, so with electricity: an indispensably useful servant, but also an ineluctably dangerous one, to be regarded with respectful mistrust at all times lest a moment's carelessness end in tragedy.
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.
That would be illegal where I live, and I think in most of the world too. In fact, on a standard residential outlet here, it would immediately bring the house power down.
Either the body is grounded or it's floating. It should never be linked to the neutral.
How?
They wouldn't trip in this case just by plugging a poorly wired appliance in. They detect an imbalance in current flow between the hot and neutral wires. If they detect more current going out than coming back in, they recognize that the current has found another path (which is bad) and trip.
Unless you have a grounded lamp (which is certainly not common here; I've never seen one) there'd be no alternate path until you provided one by being shocked, so there'd be no immediate trip. It would, however, increase safety by tripping once you were being shocked instead of simply allowing you to continue being shocked.
For example, if someone did indeed have a metal-cased grounded desk lamp whose body was also connected to neutral too; it would trip as soon as you plug it in, whether you turn it on or not, and you won't be able to turn the RCD back on until you unplug the lamp [1].
In the US they're called GFCIs as you point out, but this name is bad, since it implies that it only trips on ground faults. In reality they trip on /any/ current imbalance, regardless of how it's happening, over which conductors, or in which direction it is occurring (after all, we are talking about /alternating/ current here). Among other things, this means that if you take a line conductor from a non-RCD-protected circuit, and borrow the neutral from an RCD-protected circuit to power a load, that RCD will still trip, even though the fault isn't on the circuit(s) that the RCD was installed to protect.
As to tripping should the neutral-connected case develop line potential, a circuit breaker will immediately (< 40ms) trip anyway. As to tripping should the grounded-case develop line potential; circuit breakers will also do that if your earth fault loop impedance is low enough (and if it isn't, you'll have an additional single time-delayed master RCD for the entire installation, for fault protection anyway). In a properly designed, installed, and maintained electrical installation, such a fault will simply not exist for long (40-500ms), regardless of whether you have RCDs for additional protection or not. This makes it highly unlikely that you would subsequently come into contact with that mains-potential object; but on the off chance that you do, say, if it only develops a line to earth fault when you're touching it because it wasn't turned on yet; indeed, an RCD for additional protection is a nice thing to have.
[1] Sometimes, depending on design, one can manually hold the tripping latch up to prevent it from disconnecting even when it detects a fault. This is extremely bad design in my opinion, and is not the case with UK RCDs; the tripping mechanism is entirely internal, and even if you epoxy or padlock the latch in the on position, it will still trip correctly. I've seen some circuit breaker designs that suffer this flaw too, but again not in the UK.
Thanks to Big Clive, I have a vague but reasonable sense of what UK electrical systems are like. It's not safe, metaphorically or literally, to assume the US is up to the same standard. As you might find out the hard way if you did make such an assumption, North American electrical systems in a lot of ways are shockingly poor.
You can also get circuit breakers with integrated GFCIs (which is what we call RCBOs); those are usually double-width devices in the US (For example, with the Siemens "QF" product range [1]), however, again, single-width versions are available (For example, with the Square D "QO" product range [2]).
Because a GFCI needs to measure current flowing in both directions, it has an inherent need for a neutral connection too. This is what the flying lead is for. The circuit neutral would be terminated into the GFCI instead of the panel neutral bar; the flying lead is terminated into the panel neutral instead.
I'm also not assuming a ground; a neutral-bonded lamp body sitting on a conductive surface which is in contact with the mass of the earth would still be enough to immediately trip a GFCI under the same circumstances as my previous post, regardless of whether someone is touching it or not, and if it is turned on or not (assuming the switch is in the line conductor).
EDIT: However, this all goes to crap if the lamp only has a 2-prong plug, yes.
I agree that some aspects of US electrical installations are exceedingly bad compared to over here. For example, it is stupidly easy to shock yourself removing a live socket from a wall over there, compared to it being a basic impossibility over here -- yes, I know, safe isolation and all that, but name me a sparky that hasn't done this at least once.
[1] https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-b8b6a/images/stencil/1280x12... [2] https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-b8b6a/images/stencil/1280x12...
Another commenter pointed this out, but I have to chime in as well: no. Not true. The neutral is NOT bonded to the exterior body of a metal lamp. Not even on old fixtures built in the 1960s.
The old fixtures, if they were metal, were often not grounded, i.e. the lamp might not be connected by a 3-prong plug (hot, neutral, ground). But the neutral was definitely not bonded to the metal body.
If you inspect a new fixture, typically this means: it is either constructed with no accessible conductive parts, OR its metal case is bonded to the ground (not neutral!) and it has a 3-prong plug, OR it has a step-down transformer that converts to lower voltage before it enters the conductive lamp.
*
The thing that does happen when switching the neutral wire on a lamp is that doing so will energize the more-accessible "outer ring" of the Edison female receptacle rather than the less-accessible "center pin". This means that if you change the bulb with the switch on, you'd be more likely to contact the hot "outer ring".
Also, in most cases, the switch is only across (the wire that is supposed to be) the hot lead-- with neutral and hot swapped at the plug, you're not only energizing the outer ring of the light bulb socket, but also leaving it energized when the switch is off.
This leaves a shock hazard exposed even when the switch is off-- the lamp still won't light under normal circumstances because there's no path to ground with the switch off on the neutral line, but if you provide it one (your body) by touching it, you'll still get a shock regardless of the state of the switch.
oops, yes, good point.
Yeah, comment kinda got downvoted into oblivion for a slightly off example, but this was kind of my point. There are a lot of appliances that become significantly less safe when you put the power into places it's not supposed to be. And the danger is non-obvious.
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 to handle residential mains current, the cable began to heat up and melted its insulation.
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.
This is one of those things that are bloody obvious in retrospect, but people usually don't think about it at all
Is there a good explanation for how this can be the case in a developed country?
As an aside, it's funny, I'm not sure what qualifies for me as "the telephone company" anymore. I guess there probably is one where I live, technically, but it doesn't seem to factor in.
edit: this is evidently going to be one of those posts that fluctuates in "points" over time, bouncing up and down. It'd be fun to have a sparkline implementation that illustrates this change over time
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.
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.
At present the only example of governments running - or at least owning - communications utilities in the United States that I'm aware of are municipal broadband [1] providers, which tend to be much more well-liked by their users than something like Comcast. (and bitterly opposed by The High Priests of The Invisible Hand, who want competition but not that competition)
Of course, other countries have state-owned communications monopolies, which actually run the gamut in terms of quality and cost.
A deregulated ISP market would be a huge improvement for this country!
("regulations simply cease to exist" seems like the casual definition for "deregulation," though the actual process of deregulation is for a bunch of people to pass a new set of regulations and if they're pandering to a certain constituency, they will call it "deregulation," regardless of the effect of the regulations they just passed. See: telecom, the airlines, banking, etc.)
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.
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.
Because in CURRENT_YEAR we don't have to worry about rain fade or quirks of local terrain or unintended interference?
That's quite a big statement to make, generalized over the whole world like that.
We tend to avoid principles-based regulation in the US, but it's not destiny that regulations remain the same forever, even with our system. We certainly don't have to choose between that and not having any regulations at all (which isn't even an option when you're talking about radio spectrum, or use of wires at the last mile, or whatever).
For radio spectrum you don't need any regulations or regulators. Just establish that radio frequencies in a certain area can be owned, and use general property right rules.
This is quite different from laws protecting property, where all the state does is settle property disputes.
In slogan form, one is "rule of man" vs "rule of law".
Regulation deals with the here-and-now.
There have recently been well funded pushes into satellite internet such as Starlink and Project Kuiper.
I'll admit I don't know the details well.
My city also has regular brown outs, power outages, etc. that have greatly inconvenienced my remote work (I have done a lot of work recently over a mobile hotspot). And it's not a HUGE city, but it is sizable (600k metro, ~800,000 in the metro + surrounding areas).
But for how this can be the case: It's as another commenter says. The provider is a duopoly in my area so I have no choice. Even worse the provider doesn't have many employees who do this work, they mostly hire 3rd party consultants to do repairs/installations of infrastructure.
Since his story is worded as if it happened recently, it could be COVID-related.
Back in April I tried to get my cable company to install its home security system where I live. I was told no, because the company wasn't sending techs into anyone's homes until the virus let up.
I tried again in August, and was told it would be a very long while, as the service guys were still catching up on the backlog.
This was certainly an issue with BT-OR in the UK for a short while when lock-down first properly started and there was a combination of OR people not being able to work and home users discovering issues (or reporting those that until now had been to minor to care about) as they tried to work from home. That caused quite a back-log of work in some areas.
This has 3 important implications:
1) The return conductor (e.g. coaxial cable) may not be adequately-sized to carry the current you're asking it to, but your circuit breakers are rated in relation to the fixed internal wiring of your property, so they won't trip. This risks melting and subsequently breaking the conductor, leading to:
2) The exposed metalwork in your house becomes live. Screws at lightswitches, metal ceiling lighting pendants, copper water and gas lines, the works. All of it. This leads to:
3) An RCD (GFCI) or a device that contains an RCD (like an RCBO) will not save you when you come into contact with any of it, because the current is first passing back through that RCD on your internal neutral wiring, so there is no current imbalance from its perspective.
So yes, very dangerous. In the UK, we use concentric cabling for our street supplies, so it is very hard to accidentally sever the outer neutral conductor without also severing the inner line conductor.
This arrangement remains safe regardless of any single fault in any of the 4 wires. If the PEN conductor breaks but the local earthing still has decently low resistance, the internal PE protection that connects to the case of electronic appliances is still connected to the ground. If strong currents are drawn the voltage of the PE in relation to the real ground will increase, but the mains voltage will also fluctuate with the difference; so you might get a 20-30V drop in the mains voltage and the same voltage appears on the PE, not usually dangerous and you can see something is wrong with the power. Differential and overload protections still work since they have a safe return via the grounding rod.
If, on the other hand, the local grounding malfunctions, the PE is still secured to the PEN, which should be grounded at the nearest pole or local transformer. This is a harder defect to detect and periodic checks are recommended on the local ground, but at least you have single fault protection, and two things need to happen before a dangerous condition can occur (both local grounding and the PEN conductor must have a fault).
An adjacent benefit of having good local grounding in this configuration is cleaner and more stable voltage, since all groundings of all houses in an area are connected in parallel to the same PEN line, providing a path to the ground that might have a lower impedance than the PEN line feeding it.
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.
If no one on the street has an earthing rod and the PEN breaks, then all the PE internal wiring of all houses will be connected, via transformers, light-bulbs etc. to the live wire. So every grounded appliance in the area is live. This is such a dangerous scenario that a grounding rod carrying half the current of the street is the least of your worries. All differential protections are also disabled.
Additionally, houses will typically be spread around on a three phase supply with the PEN carrying the disequilibrium current. If PEN breaks uphill from such a distribution cell then you end up with two houses connected in series to two phases, giving a voltage √3 = 1.732... higher than the mains (208 vs 120V in US or 400V vs 230V in Europe). The voltage will spread depending on the resistance of the two houses. So if a house has large consumers it will see a very low voltage, while it's series pair might see a huge voltage spyke. This is an incredibly dangerous scenario from a fire hazard perspective. A similar thing can happen in a 120/240V single phase system.
So, if you want good, solid, safe voltage in TN-C-S systems, a good grounding (preferably less than 1 Ohm) should be connected at the separation point between the TN-Combined supply and your internal TN-Separated wiring. This guarantees your differential protections will work regardless of what happens uphill.
Of course, if this is an uncommon practice in the area and not allowed by local code then that's that. But I wouldn't feel very safe without, at a minimum, a ground fault detection relay (which has it's own mini-earthing rod and detects when PEN floats at a too high voltage), and also a over-voltage protection.
PEN faults are very common, it's not a question of if, it's a question of when. Coaxial supplies are used around here too, with recommended local earthing and mandatory ground fault detection relay if local earthing does not exist. Still, it happens that lighting destroys both the central conductor and the electronic ground relay, yet line voltage still finds a way to shock people (you don't need a very good connection for that). Other times, the aluminum-steel core of the coax breaks down. Other times, idiot electricians work on the network and create PEN faults, exploding all the devices of a certain home by exposing them to three phase voltage.
Here in Australia the coax connection from the street typically goes through a galvanic isolator to avoid this situation, rather than being bonded to the earth.
On a whim, I wandered down the road. It had stopped raining. About 50m down the road there was a dry patch of pavement and a smell of burning plastic. Another 100m down the road was the electricity substation, with a guy from the electric company who said he was trying yet another 300A fuse. He said that often the cable can be shorted out by ground water, but connecting it up again may heat it enough to drive the water out and make it fine. I asked him after breaking three fuses already, how he thought another one would solve the problem, and would he like to know where the short was? Took a bit of persuading to get him to walk 100m up the road to where the dry patch and smell of burning plastic was, and of course by then the smell had worn off a bit. Another electric company guy arrived with a smelling device, which they bashed into the tarmac to try to identify the location of the break, eventually settling with exactly where I told them it was.
Within a couple of hours after that, a team had ripped up the pavement, dug down to the cable, spliced it, wrapped it up in waterproofing, refilled the hole, and relaid the pavement.
But I think your story wins.
I think it started with old cable systems where people would connect their cable themselves without paying for service. Then when the techs would go to install service they would see if any of the nearby houses were hooked up without being on the customer list, and cut their cable.
A friend of mine had her cable cut, probably for the same reason. Unfortunately the cable went to her satellite dish, not comcast.
(I guess it could have been competitors too)
I agree, I even cringed a little bit when I wrote it. But I didn't want to fully give everything away so it was just a bad edit :) Your suggestion would work a lot better.
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 to crackling in the ground, where we found the faulty cabling.
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
Here's a good video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsXUuuV4_sw
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.
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 up in this discussion. The Wolverhampton Express and Star points out, for example, that Aberhosan is not on fibre yet.
* https://www.expressandstar.com/news/uk-news/2020/09/22/old-t...
And almost no-one acknowledges that this light-on-details story is light on details because they took it, word for word in some cases, from an OpenReach press release.
* https://www.openreach.com/news/second-hand-tv-wipes-out-broa...
* https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/22/old_tv_broke_broadban...
"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.
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/astrophysics/m...
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-invisible-and-often...
Why not implement it as an optical fibre?
Non-conducting and easy to continuously check that there are no breaks.
Great idea though! I'd always thought that looking at the phase of an electroni impluse would give you a good idea of how far along the path a break occurred, as the return signal's phase should be inverted at the break point and you can then use time of flight to infer the distance of the break.
[0] This is a hyper deep part of jewish law and there are many exceptions. Please consult your local rabbi before taking my word for anything.
Dunno how they handle breaks during the Sabbath...
But I'm 100% out of my league here.
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 street the houses on both sides of mine are able to sign up for g.fast but I'm not. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised it was the UK at all.
BT/Openreach/Whoever aren't interested in changing this, but luckily I can get Virgin Media (overpriced IMO, but better than the 20Mb alternative).
However I just contacted BT openreach after finding some neighboring properties can get fiber and they told me they are building a new cabinet next month, hooray!
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.
Probably the faster connection has some latency benefit, but on the whole I wouldn't factor "super fast Internet" into choosing my next place to live
But the really important thing is upload speed. It shouldn't take ten minutes to upload a two minute video master to YouTube. Also off-site backups of large files would be nice, but is too slow over cable modem upload speeds.
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 road to property
4. Water and sewage
5. Electricity
6. Fiber gigabit Internet
What else am I missing?
Internet: https://epb.com/home-store/internet
Well and septic isn't too bad, if the system is well built and the lot is appropriate (well needs an aquifer, septic needs a big enough flat patch and appropriate soils).
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.
“We don’t have plans to upgrade your area yet. But we’re working with Government and industry to change that.”
Along with the usual “Register your interest” form (which I’ve filled out, but am pretty sure have been done in the past).
If they instead engage at the outset, Openreach says OK, you need to put in ducting to run fibre to each house from the street and then along the street itself, our engineers will turn up and actually install fibre and enable simple phone service by default. But obviously when the engineers roll up to an estate with a dozen almost-finished houses "Dig up everything and start over" is not an option, so you get legacy copper phone lines. Too bad.
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.
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. Apparently, you didn't eve get a BT line installed, and were completely stuck with this dodgy 3rd party provider for the life of the property. That and the quality of Persimmons workmanship was enough to make us walk away from what was actually a very "sweet" deal.
We live on a relatively recent Persimmon estate but luckily OFNL got the contract; even that's a bit dodgy, all of the ISPs have crap websites and are a little dodgy looking (although the service has been alright).
And yeh, no BT line. It was an exclusive contract. OpenReach say they wont even install lines until the roads are adopted. Ironically, there is an independent Care Home built next door to us & OpenReach have been up and down the street and in our estate cabinet busy fitting their lines....
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.
Depends on terrain for how easy it is to do.
I really like Ubiquiti products (e.g. Litebeam, Nanostation) because they are cheap, reliable, and have great features. They do need configuration, but I worked it out from Internet and YouTube when I did it.
Street cabinets would be FTTC. The cabinet is full of electronics, for FFTC there's a full VDSL modem which is you can feel and hear a working FTTC cabinet, it gets hot, so it has cooling fans that spew warm air and makes a gentle buzzing noise.
For FTTP they can and do either just bury everything (in a city or where the cables are underground for tidiness) or hang it from a pole if there are telegraph poles in your area. Because there's very little of consequence near you, the smarts are all in an exchange building that might be a full day's walk from you rather than street cabinets typically just a few hundred metres from each property.
> anything smaller than a few hundred homes, copper is still the standard.
If you're building twenty properties the fibre is free if the builder asks. Nothing to pay, just so long as you get Openreach in at the start to ensure a viable deployment.
If you're building between two and nineteen properties it's cost sharing, the builder pays part of the extra install cost over copper for their smaller site.
I've no idea what the engagement was like, but it was Redrow so I doubt they just slapped the 50 or so houses up and then thought about it.
Line got replaced, apparently it was 60 years old. Worked a charm since.
I'm dismayed but not surprised that Openreach in the linked example launched straight into replacing sections of cable. They don't seem to spend much time actually analysing a problem.
That sounds odd and may be an error in OR's data. I would try to escalate it up to the point where it is investigated...
It is far from unheard of for one side of a street to have different options, or even one part of one side of the street, because for some reason of geography or cab capacity when the houses were first connected they are connected to different cabinets and not all of them have been upgraded to enable g.fast. But such things shouldn't be localised to one home unless you are in a mansion with massive grounds (in which case stop messing with the consumer arm of BT-OR, you can afford to have your own private leased line installed via the business arm!).
Be careful switching to g.fast if upstream throughput is important to you. I know people who had the top-end upstream offered by FTTC (~17Mbit/s) but got less after switching to g.fast (though better downstream, and for them like most that was the important factor so they were happy).
I lived in San Jose, California, in a neighborhood with underground utilities. One afternoon two police officers banged loud on the door and yelled "San Jose Police! Open up!"
My wife opened the door while I walked down the stairs with my Motorola StarTAC in my hand and its antenna extended. I thought "OMG, what if this looks like a gun?"
The officers said that 911 had been dialed from our address, and there was no one on the line and no one answered when the dispatcher called back, so they had to come out to investigate.
We all took a deep breath and I told the officers "I think I know what happened. Come on in and I can show you."
We went to the wall-mount phone in the kitchen. (Remember those?) I pressed the speaker button and explained.
"Do you hear all those clicks? Our underground phone line got flooded from the bad storm we just had, and the line has been shorting out off and on all day. Remember the old fashioned rotary dial phones? Those worked by making and breaking the circuit just like this. I'll bet there were nine clicks in a row, then one click, then one more click. So these short circuits dialed 911. We're all fine here other than the bad phone service. Sorry you had to come out to investigate."
After that the officers were pretty chill about it. I just wished I had some donuts to offer them to thank them for their time!
I taught myself to tap-dial and managed to call a porno phone line once. My classmates thought I was some sort of super hacker.
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.
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 village I'm not sure there's a lot of people who can discern the difference between, ah it's slow again and Oh, I lost connection, look at that SNR value. I better write a technical report to ISP.
> 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.
Even the simplest problem, if it's happening 1 in 10.000 is not a no-brainer because, you won't think that'd happen. Especially because of an old TV.
This is a problem then and should be addressed.
> problems rooted to bandwidth scarcity happened all the time
But the ISP should be able to tell whether their uplink is saturated (and actually upgrade it if it happens too often), so if they're consistently getting complaints around a certain timeframe and the uplink is not saturated during those timeframes then it must be something else.
> Especially because of an old TV
But the diagnostic procedure had nothing to do whether it's an old TV or something else. It was caused by EMI and is detectable with readily-available test equipment which indeed detected it immediately.
Furthermore monitoring packet loss at the PPP level can be done (in fact, Andrews & Arnold - a small ISP in the UK - does it) so if an ISP doesn't have this in place to detect widespread faults then something is also wrong there - why are they operating with zero visibility on their network?
They concluded that something is fishy because normal procedures didn't fix anything. I'm not sure that this is a problem they diagnose 5 times a week.
> But the ISP should be able to tell whether their uplink is saturated (and actually upgrade it if it happens too often), so if they're consistently getting complaints around a certain timeframe and the uplink is not saturated during those timeframes then it must be something else.
Good luck escalating this problem from a village to correct people in a big-shiny-ISP(TM). They're too busy(!) to look for 10 customers' problem. I accept that 18 months in unacceptable but, this is the reality we're in. Support and Ops teams are always overworked because management thinks that "the load just doesn't justify more hands in that department".
> This is a problem then and should be addressed.
The backbone operators and ISPs doesn't monitor SNR levels because they're transient and doesn't provide meaningful data. If you want to do it, it's millions of connections. Also, Not everyone use the standard equipment provided by the ISP so, they cannot get info from all devices (e.g.: from mine). So, endpoint ops are complex if you're working on a WAN with random equipment.
Instead, using bandwidth graphs to find problems is more practical and reliable. Since the problem starts at 07:00, it shows like "They're not using their connections much, eh?" in the said graphs.
Disclosure: My workplace also happens to be the national academic network operator. I'm two hops away from a country-wide core router.
But why did it take 18 months to realize that? You've got an issue that occurs consistently and is preventing customers from getting the service they're paying for (and are presumably in contracts so they can't even cancel without a major fight).
> They're too busy(!) to look for 10 customers' problem
So we're in agreement that this is unacceptable and resolving this problem has been grossly mismanaged and someone should be held accountable?
> doesn't monitor SNR levels because they're transient and doesn't provide meaningful data
This seems weird to me. You've got a nationwide network designed to run on old, poor quality wiring (the article doesn't specify whether it's DSL or coax, but it would apply to both). Wiring issues should be expected and automated processes in place to monitor it and quickly detect issues like this one.
> Not everyone use the standard equipment provided by the ISP
Can't this be collected at the DSLAM or CMTS level? Or in case of DSL, even at the PPP level? (Andrews & Arnold - a small DSL ISP in the UK - measures packet loss at that level and while it's not true SNR, it would be enough for these purposes as localized packet loss would pretty much always mean bad SNR or failing equipment)
Unless you had 50+% of the village calling up every morning for a week, it would not have been identified as a cluster event (and I suspect many ops orgs don't have the means to identify clusters anyway).
“The mechanic told me it would cost $5000(!) to fix, so I decided to scrap the car instead.”
I do know people who worked in radio interference and they told me one time they traced a fault to a Budgie cage.
The Budgie had a swing and when it was in use it caused a short which effected the subs (customer) line.
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.
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 cabinet to the user premises into the [splitter and] modem. One user per twisted pair only.
However, the wires are not shielded and thus are susceptible to both crosstalk from other pairs and also EMI given that it's using electrical signals to transfer data.
And of course, the speeds are low for most users due to the local loop length and in general VDSL2 35b maxes out at 300/100 Mbps at around ~80 meters, and VDSL2 17a maxes out at 100/50 Mbps at around 100 meters.
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.
My ISP is rolling that out, though with delays. They are a spin-off of a public utility.
Already rolled out the CPE looks like this:
https://genexis.eu/product/fibertwist/
and in the user-forum of that ISP there are people describing how to directly interface to fiber with a pre-fabricated cable and SFP-transceiver with the right wavelengths, from a self-owned router with SFP-cage.
But you still have to connect over PPPoE with a MTU of 1492 bytes. Multiple times actually, on different VLANs for management, VoIP, and public dynamic IPv4(CGNAT)/IPv6(native/64)
RE: PPPoE - in general most AAA systems already work with PPP and since ISPs generally have to support legacy infrastructure too, and multiple access technologies, they "force" all users to connect with PPPoE for billing and data collection for identification.
For example, a national ISP in my country uses PPP for xDSL (which is a dedicated medium) and GPON (which is a shared medium, however the authorization and speed limiting is done by the ONT S/N), none of which "need it". You can also mix GPON and DSL logins and it will work, even between users.
The only logical reason for this, from what I can see, is that they are forced to sell access to their infrastructure (being an ILEC) to other ISPs, so they use PPP to route traffic from users of other ISPs from the BRAS to the corresponding network gateway using a MPLS tunnel.
For business fiber, not based on xPON, there is no requirement for a PPP session, and instead you get assigned an IP address range that you router should use, and the fiber is connected with a SFP+ module to your router. On the ISP's side, your "port" is limited to accessing their intranet for management and remote control, and your assigned IP address range.
Most of the UK, especially outside of large towns, is
1) Twisted pair to the cabinet then Twisted pair to the exchange ("Normal DSL", ADSL)
2) Twisted pair to the cabinet then Fibre to the exchange ("Fibre broadband", FTTC)
3) Fibre to the cabinet then Fibre to the exchange (FTTP)
Cable TV is a minority thing in the UK, maybe 20% of TV owning households, compared with 50% on satelite of some sort, and 95% on terrestial.
FTTP doesn't bother going to a cabinet at all since there would be nothing interesting for it to do there. GPON splitters are low maintenance and so you can just throw one up on a telegraph pole or bury it.
Yes this means that an era of street cabinets gives way to an era in which it's just telegraph poles or the network infrastructure disappears entirely, buried in the street.
> Cable TV is a minority thing in the UK, maybe 20% of TV owning households.
This may well be, however over 50% of UK households could buy their Internet service from Virgin (the Cable TV company) and get DOCSIS over that coaxial cable, they needn't choose to buy television service (although of course Virgin would like them to do so)
Unless they actually mean that tv blew away everyone's wifi, which is impressive but unlikely.
A good ISP definitely does monitor SNR. 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 assumptions).
And this is why providers hate heterogeneous networks :-) Mine politely asks you to plug in the original modem before they'll help you debug a connectivity issue. But even then, there are sometimes standards like TR-069 that apply across vendors.
Even if SNR itself isn't logged, dynamic line management would surely result in dropped speeds, which would be logged, and would stand out as anomalous?
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.
considering all that, why do they need to explain something took 18 months to fix that affected a few people again? Because I'm starting to think you must live in some sort of paradise I have been cast out of, and it's not fair!
I worked at a UK ISP a couple years back and lets just say the 'monitoring' that ISPS have is extremely limited. Openreach (the company that manages the phone lines, which ISPs lease) almost certainly has more monitoring but the problem is the customer calls the ISP, and the ISP then tells Openreach - which means there's a fairly huge disconnect between the customer and the engineers fixing the line.
That's a choice. Presumably a cost conscious choice, not a limit imposed by Openreach.
A&A presents each customer with a live updated chart of bandwidth usage, latency, and low-level polling of the DSL modem in the customer's home. If your line drops even if you aren't "using" it for anything, you can opt to get a SMS about that, and choose whether this applies at weekends or overnight.
They even plot the rate of "login"/ "logout" events for the modems, both as a whole and mapped onto exchange locations so that you can see if there's a problem beyond just you got unlucky this time.
Since then the firmware on devices seems to have either dropped those types of features (cost reduction) or restricted them to an ISP-accessible interface ("security"). :(
The first customer complaint was likely just one customer to begin with and could have reported that the issue was occurring at a different time of day depending on when they used the Internet.
It wouldn't have been until they had multiple complaints and eventually a user who could pinpoint losing connection at 7:00am that they looked at it being something external to the individual customers connection.
What was the TV interfering with exactly? The ISP's equipment coming into the village?
I don't understand how you know it was simple. It's not clear to me what happened in the BBC article.
> You have a problem that's repeatable right on schedule
This is incorrect, the TV had to be turned on. Hyperbolic quotes on BBC like "It turned out that at 7am every morning " are not actually going to be true in the field.
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
Relevant story - we moved in to a new build and waited 3 months to get ADSL. Not anything fancy, just plain old ADSL. The provider we went with was Talk Talk, and they basically had to go to Openreach and ask them to sort out the issue (turned out to be something to do with over capacity at the exchange.) This dragged on for months. I spent hours on the phone talking to someone in India, who then talked to someone in the UK who then got on to Openreach. It was a wholly terrible experience. I finally lost my proverbial s??t and complained directly to Openreach (and believe it or not actually got a response with the real reason for the delay - some infrastructure through which caballing went through had collapsed and they needed to schedule it to be fixed, but as it was under a dual carriage way, that was taking some time. Still possibly a lie, but better than the nonsense I was getting from the guy in India.) So as they had been lying to me constantly, I gave up and cancelled the contract, and we went with BT instead because we could then use the FON wireless of our neighbours in the interim. Well, one week later the ADSL came on. This was at least 2 weeks before it was scheduled by Openreach and BT, who were aware of the issue. So all we can assume is someone magically fixed it. To this day I don't know if BT and Openreach had some special relationship or if we were just lucky and BT juggled something in the exchange, but - yeah, 4 years later we have cruddy ADSL still, and no Fibre or Cable.
Sky and BT retail definitely pay for the top options of services.
> After 18 months engineers began an investigation after a cable replacement programme failed to fix the issue.
1. You have an issue with your broadband in a rural area. You call up your ISP. You get some handwavy answer about contention and they ask you to restart your router and call them back if it happens again.
2. The next time they agree to have an engineer take a look. You hear nothing back. You contact them again, they say their engineer looked at the exchange and found no issues.
3. The next time you ring them and they agree to send an engineer to your house. The engineer (contracted out) arrives at 2pm, they check your modem, rant a bit off the record about how they don't fund shit, then determines that everything's working fine at 2pm, and it's the ISP's problem that their network collapses at 6pm because they oversold the rate of your village.
4. You contact the ISP. They read the engineer's report, saw it was working fine at 2pm, and decided they didn't need to take action. They suggest using the internet at another time of day, such as when you and most of your neighbours are away from the house and at work.
5. If enough people in the area decide they complain they might finally deign to do something about their service in a few months. More likely is some other ISP comes around and signs up all the customers so pissed off with the last one, until most of the village is now on this ISP and the same problems reocur.
6. After like 4 or so years you've looped through all the ISPs, maybe there's a new generation of tech which promises higher speeds but they can't be bothered funding anything locally so your actual speed and reliability is unchanged.
You say that, but the San Antonio Caltrain to California Avenue Caltrain stretch still has an enormous T-Mobile deadzone, even after I twice reported it to them and both times they said "they'd send someone to take a look."
Another one around same time same government building and was running Videoconferencing over 2Mbps circuits. Would get intermittent glitches - turned out the Q bearer for the line comming in was old and whilst other networking was fine running over that and the odd few bits messed up on networking could be retransmitted alas TCP/IP, for video, such hits stood out. Replaced that and worked lovely.
But weather related issue for networking would always be the go to, often heavy rain would mess up some microwave link or CAB unit and cause issues.
Another favourite was TZ spikes and had issue which saw call congestion around 3pm every day in the UK on these batch of modems - turned out that was when America woke up and would see a surge in calls, saturating/spiking the capacity for the telco provider and artificially capping our incoming call lines before we hit our capacity.
Then the seasonal ones like birds nesting or tree's growing or a tree ok but when the wind was north west over a certain speed it would blip between the microwave link - microwave links can be so much fun for the gotcha issues that can happen.
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.
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?
I stripped down, and rewired everything in my studio to track it down. Not sure if it's the PSU, or something USB specific. But, as soon as I unplugged it from the surge protector, the noise vanished.
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 neighbourhood blocks.
The Engineer only noticed this when the little old lady offered him a cuppa and he saw the budgie swing away.
> 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.
I hope the cable company bought the "mortified" TV owner (possibly old/poor) a new TV because they've done nothing obviously wrong.
I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to jam public signals village-wide: https://www.fcc.gov/general/jammer-enforcement
It's a funny story but sounds like a potentially harsh impact on them - and why should they just be told to stop using something with no alternative option presented?
Anyway, good PR for the company given the story has got traction.
Two network switches, laptop power supply, dishwasher, streaming music device.
My receive antenna (active loop) is about 50 feet from the house. I’m still not satisfied with the interference levels, but it’s not coming from me.
> Anyone using electrical apparatus is responsible for ensuring that it does not cause harmful interference to others. If this happens, we may require the user to rectify the situation.
[1]: https://www.iaru.org
I think from a comment on the El Reg version of the story its the BBC that has jurisdiction - id have thought it was Ofcom my self.
The neighbor would often complain about his cable and ask if I had the same problems. I did. One day, he'd had enough, and switched to DSL and satellite.
My house's connectivity issues vanished.
I had to get one to make MOCA (ethernet over cable) work in my current house.
So it's posssibly more of a story about the ISP being cheap.
If the speed doesn't saturate DSL or coax standards, running fiber to every home is not very wise, even for long term.
Until recently, fiber was not even that cheap to distribute in larger cities. It's been 3-4 years since the city I live in switched to FTTX distribution.
Why not?
Old copper will keep deteriorating and spending money repairing it is a waste. Fiber on the other hand is future-proof for the next ~50 years provided it's kept in good condition as you can increase bandwidth by upgrading equipment at both ends without replacing the actual glass.
Because until fiber becomes economical, you can use your existing infrastructure and keep it up for minimal expense. A carefully installed outdoor cable is extremely resilient to elements, even over long term.
Then, after a certain point, instead of running two infrastructures, you can piggyback everything to even higher capacity fiber and distribute with it only. Break it out with FTTX infra or so-called pizza boxes so, you can provide the same services with less strands and maintenance (presuming your netops team is competent).
Telco class equipment is not exactly cheap in any standard.
Why not? Fiber is fast, less prone to rust, doesn't have the shared media problem of cable internet and is cheap to maintain. If the uplink gets saturated you can replace one big fiber instead of putting additional hardware in the local POP to get just a little bit more speed out of DSL.
It was economical enough to put fiber down in the 20k village where I was born about a decade ago even though there was already cable and 30mbps DSL. I can understand the US being hard to get fiber down due to exclusivity contracts with ISPs for buildings or even cities as well as the distances you need to dig to reach a city, but as far as I know the UK is not affected by any of that.
The UK is affected by pig-ignorant landords refusing to give wayleave to carriers to install fibre. IIRC the problem affects 70% of fibre installs.
Westminster are working on an amendment to the law which will address this very problem.
Until some competition shows up. Too bad Google Fiber stopped expanding in the US, i remember reading that everywhere they showed up the "traditional" ISPs suddenly found money to upgrade their infrastructure and reduce prices.
Yeah, you're right. I'm writing my answers with pure naivety. There's also "Meh, we're earning enough money, no need to make customers happier" mentality which I find really, really wrong.
If you live in SF definitely check if Sonic's own fiber is available to you. Most of Sunset and Richmond have it. Some parts of Castro, Mission, and SOMA (I think) last I checked. $60/month for gigabit symmetric.
The company where my brother works linked 2 branches a few miles away with fiber almost 10 years ago for less than $1,000 in a single night in the middle of a capital city. Permits? No. Rent to the pole owners? No. This is how most of the city got 1 Gbps internet for ~ $10/month.
Then they committed to running it to all non-members living in the service area who sign up within 5 more years.
If it weren't for cooperatives, we'd be left in the dirt for decades. Our local township signed an agreement with AT&T back in the day for AT&T to offer high speed internet. So, their high speed is dial-up that they have never upgraded, but the agreement grants them a monopoly.
I blame the local township government for not knowing what the hell they were doing, and I blame AT&T for sitting on a monopoly and never doing anything with it.
Either way, Fiber now!!
How it's being pushed out is a hodge-podge of technologies, Microwave, FTTx, Wi-fi repeaters - and mixtures of those and more. My guess is that it was the latter that was being interfered with in this case.
As to why it took so long to diagnose, well telcos being useless is pretty common (although 18 months is quite impressive).
Maybe they were just blaming the backhaul, but once that was fixed, was obvious problem was on the last-mile (and may have been different providers)
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.
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.
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 <theoretical maximum>" figure?
It has been popping up in quite a few villages in East Yorkshire due to being paid for by the county rural broadband fund.
In this example customers would have been calling their ISP to complain, and having to go through the layers of escalation.
Also, it's a pretty remote location. Lots of rural areas in the UK have terrible Internet. I think this is the area in Google maps.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Aberhosan,+Machynlleth+S...
Mostly true, I believe Virgin put their own cables in the ground, and younger companies like hyperoptic.
These days the Virgin name is just about brand recognition.
They still manage their own infrastructure regardless what their company name is. They don’t use another supplier like openreach for their infra which was my point.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-40108145
Either broadband is truly awful out that way (probably this, TBH) or one of the local Openreach engineers is related to a BBC news reporter...
While commercial fiber is usually point-to-point, consumer-grade fiber commonly uses a Passive Optical Network. Basically, a single fiber is split to multiple devices, and the upstream device allocates time slots to devices in which they can transmit. Just like what's happening with cable internet.
This means that, theoretically, a rogue end-user device could ignore the timeslot allocation and disrupt the signals sent by other devices. But because every user ends up using exactly the same equipment, I highly doubt this ever happens in practice. There's nobody connecting ancient analogue devices to fiberoptic cables, after all.
EDIT: my understanding isn't great here, but could I also listen outside of my time window and snoop on other traffic?
In principle the technology might arrange for encryption keys between your endpoint and the smarts at a remote exchange so that it's impossible without physical access to another terminal to interpret messages for other terminals or impersonate them. In practice I doubt this is actually effective.
You should assume that traffic you send may be intercepted by an adversary. If you're confident that you don't have any adversaries then I suppose that needn't concern you, otherwise you should probably put most confidence in security at layers you can actually inspect, like TLS/ HTTPS rather than mysterious proprietary technologies like your FTTP installation.
There are standards for stuff like the encryption of GPON, but those standards aren't for implementing by us, so they leave lots of gaps that could be filled by your service provider with strong, security focused decision making, or could be "Eh, who cares just set the password as 'password' on all the terminals and stop fiddling with it". It doesn't take too much cynicism to assume the latter.
The problem is that, although they're not expensive [1], reading one is complicated. You need to know what the spectrum usage is supposed to look like.
Cell towers ought to have interference detection built in. They're already software defined radios.
[1] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Foxtech-Portable-Hand...
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.
Can't any other modem (on which you have root access) be used to flood it? Furthermore why are they even worried about a modem when someone with malicious intent can just ground the cable or even send mains electricity into it and permanently damage all the equipment on the line?
At least as far as I know, cable-tv networks and devices are protected against both of these failure modes: grounding should trigger a fuse in the amplifier which means at worst it's one's own house that is cut off, sending mains on the line should not be problematic as overvoltage protection is present anywhere across the line because of lightning strike protection, and customer-side equipment should be capacitively coupled only.
Sending crap on intended frequencies that have no protection across the network however is a real problem.
This old TV doesn't have chromecast or netflix built in for on demand streaming
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.
Interference can happen from many other devices and it is not uncommon for the providers and state to find these devices and sometimes fine the individual for using/installing them. People install all kinds of stuff without knowing it can cause problems. Cell repeaters and devices that are not in spec or not even FCC approved etc.
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. You should test the same scenario with other outlets in your house. If it does not happen there, then there may be something wrong with the wiring to your computer outlet, have an electrician look at it.
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.
What probably happened was high inrush current on the iron core transformer, and shitty 90s chinese power supply caused the opposite of a voltage spike, which I don't know the english term for.
The lamp became my bedside table lamp. A duty it serves to this day.
"Voltage drop" or "brownout"
Also, CRTs render each scan line in real time whereas modern TVs have to receive all 480 lines before they can render a frame. This introduces a non-trivial amount of latency into the video feed which can make certain old games unpleasant to play.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2015/04...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/carstairs-westview-co...
I can tell from the news report.