Fiber is immune to this kind of thing isn't it?
So it's posssibly more of a story about the ISP being cheap.
So it's posssibly more of a story about the ISP being cheap.
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.
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)
It has been popping up in quite a few villages in East Yorkshire due to being paid for by the county rural broadband fund.
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?
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.
Telco class equipment is not exactly cheap in any standard.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!!
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.