24 ms·

Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

Nextgrid 6y ago
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.
- bayindirh 6y ago
  > that presumably shows up in the logs Ah, no. SNR problems in the shared medium is not something wathced or logged. I remember losing internet connection on heavy rains sometimes because an odd cable shorted at an underground gallery. It wasn't FTTX then, so it was not easy to find. > You have a problem that's repeatable right on schedule. Similar problems rooted to bandwidth scarcity happened all the time, so in a 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.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    > SNR problems in the shared medium is not something wathced or logged 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?
    - bayindirh 6y ago
      > 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. 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.
      - Nextgrid 6y ago
        > because normal procedures didn't fix anything 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)
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    This is openretch (openreach) not Virgin so not sure where you get shared medium from 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.
    - bayindirh 6y ago
      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.
      - milankragujevic 6y ago
        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 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.
        LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
        By that you mean GPON, I guess? Not so here, where it is PTP. And an ISP with excellent peering.
        milankragujevic 6y ago
        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.
  - lima 6y ago
    > Ah, no. SNR problems in the shared medium is not something wathced or logged. A good ISP definitely does monitor SNR. It's a basic metric available from each individual customer device.
    - bayindirh 6y ago
      > 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).
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - lima 6y ago
        They still have SNR metrics on their end of the connection. 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.
  - JosephRedfern 6y ago
    > 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. 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?
  - tonyb 6y ago
    This isn’t accurate. The amount of data available on a DOCSIS network is incredible. Per modem SNR, power levels, preEq data, etc. If the data is used properly it cans find a loose screw on a tap or a damaged cable down the the foot. That being said impulse noise is one of the harder things to track down. If the modern tools don’t work most MSOs would end up doing the “unplug a leg and see if the SNR gets better” method until they found the offending house.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  considering the thousands of bad ux experiences to outright bugs I encounter every day, considering that some of them are bugs that have lasted for more than a year, considering I just wrote up a 20 page proposal on fixing the search for a pretty big Scandinavian site is obviously costing them money by not having it fixed on stuff that has been the same way for years, considering the governmental sites I am forced to use that are abusively bad and that companies put up job advertisements bragging about how they made these sites and that if you come work for them you will get to work on those sites as well... 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!
- aussieguy1234 6y ago
  It's not surprising. As a software engineer I've seen bugs that took days to track down which were fixed with a single line of code.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    With removing a single line of code, and in some cases even just a spurious period or comma.
- kn100 6y ago
  You'd be surprised how hard it is to identify SHINE. In places like this, you'll probably find the fastest broadband available is actually ADSL2+ - which is highly susceptible to noise, and in some places in the UK the lines which run to peoples houses aren't even copper, they're ALU - which is obviously not ideal. Even the tiniest of things can have an enormous impact on line performance. 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.
  - tialaramex 6y ago
    > I worked at a UK ISP a couple years back and lets just say the 'monitoring' that ISPS have is extremely limited. 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.
    - donalhunt 6y ago
      Many years ago when I was having cable modem issues, I used to scrape the SNMP off the modem and map stuff like that locally. Was very helpful when diagnosing issues with Level 1 support. "yes... it happens 20 times a day at these times..." 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"). :(
- dwd 6y ago
  Interference is probably way down the list of potential causes. 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.
- xenadu02 6y ago
  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.
  - mannykannot 6y ago
    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.
- aaron695 6y ago
  Can you explain what has happened here at a technical level? 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.
- stoobs 6y ago
  Short answer - it's BT. 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
  - memsom 6y ago
    No it is worse than that, it is Openreach. BT spun them off, and they are not the same company anymore - this was to avoid being told they had a monopoly on the lines. But in truth, BT get a lot more priority with Openreach than any other provider, but the quality of the service Openreach provides is inadequate at best anyway. 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.
    - sgt101 6y ago
      You get what you pay for from Openreach - or more precisely the service provider pays little, and tells you it's Openreach while you pay lots. Sky and BT retail definitely pay for the top options of services.
- andybak 6y ago
  It probably takes 18 months to get a support case escalated to the point where a real engineer looks at it.
  - jve 6y ago
    Probably. From the wording in article they BEGAN solving the issue after 18 months. But then, it was only after some cable has been replaced - that could have taken a while to plan, budget and actually do, then again collect feedback. > After 18 months engineers began an investigation after a cable replacement programme failed to fix the issue.
- Macha 6y ago
  In Ireland, not the UK, but from what I hear the ISP market is pretty similar. 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.
- awalton 6y ago
  > 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. 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."
- unnouinceput 6y ago
  Here is your explanation. They didn't care.
mschuster91 6y ago
The joys of shared medium. IIRC, AVM FritzBox'es with cable modems are ridiculously locked down compared to their DSL counterparts to prevent people from hacking the DOCSIS transmitters to flood the cable with junk.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  > hacking the DOCSIS transmitters to flood the cable with junk 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?
  - brna 6y ago
    Why mains? https://youtu.be/9M_OX-O9JKk https://youtu.be/9M_OX-O9JKk
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    > 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.
nottorp 6y ago
Fiber is immune to this kind of thing isn't it? So it's posssibly more of a story about the ISP being cheap.
- bayindirh 6y ago
  There might be fiber running up the village. 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.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    > running fiber to every home is not very wise, even for long term. 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.
    - bayindirh 6y ago
      > Old copper will keep deteriorating and spending money repairing it is a waste. 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).
      - fomine3 6y ago
        How deploying fiber more becomes economical? I expect the cost won't decrease much unlike semiconductor. So If it won't be more economical, faster replacement is better strategy.
andrea92 6y ago
Lol, that sounds like such a weird case :D no wonder it took so long...
- dwd 6y ago
  Reminded me of the problem the Parkes observatory had for many years with unidentified radio signals https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2015/04/10/rogue-microwave-ovens-are-the-culprits-behind-mysterious-radio-signals/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2015/04...
- SummerlyMars 6y ago
  It reminds me of a grocery store parking lot that seemingly prevented car key fobs from working. There's a link to the explanation in the article, but it's about as light on details as the BBC article, unfortunately. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/carstairs-westview-co-op-grocery-car-key-fob-1.4999558 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/carstairs-westview-co...
- zhrvoj 6y ago
  Fake news with so many flaws - others listed them above. Simple goal to put blame on old analog equipment. Just buy digitaal...digitaaalll...whooo... (so that we can control every each one of you).
hellweaver666 6y ago
I remember back when I worked support for a broadband supplier, long-term "unsolvable" problems were almost always related to dodgy electronic devices in the house. Most common of all was Christmas lights! (you would be surprised how many people put them up in October!)
- implements 6y ago
  Power sockets with built-in usb charging ports also emit a fair bit of RF interference - we had to move the kitchen radio because of it.
  - hunta2097 6y ago
    Ungrounded (floating) switching power supplies can emit a lot of high frequency noise. Unfortunately this is the majority of PSUs these days.
  - H1Supreme 6y ago
    Ran into a problem in my studio (audio recording) earlier this month because of a powered USB hub with charging ports. I kept getting this faint rhythmic ticking noise in my guitars. 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.
cs02rm0 6y ago
I naively thought this was going to be somewhere like rural India, not the UK (albeit relatively rural Wales). I'm forever calling out engineers because the line crackles to the point it's difficult to take a call and my internet speed drops from ~65Mbps to ~10. Maybe I should start looking for old TVs. Somehow, being on a road where the houses were only built 5 years ago we have copper lines and on my side of the 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.
- dan1234 6y ago
  On my street, my house is one of 4 connected directly to the exchange instead of a cabinet, which means I can't get fibre (only FTTC is available here). BT/Openreach/Whoever aren't interested in changing this, but luckily I can get Virgin Media (overpriced IMO, but better than the 20Mb alternative).
  - ChildOfChaos 6y ago
    I have the same, but can't get Virgin. 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!
  - tialaramex 6y ago
    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.
    - sippingjippers 6y ago
      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 case much lower than that. 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
gpuhacker 6y ago
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
- andreasley 6y ago
  Or microwave ovens posing as astronomical objects [1]. [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/astrophysics/microwave-ovens-posing-as-astronomical-objects https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/astrophysics/m...
- steanne 6y ago
  they did the same thing in west virginia with a heating pad. https://www.wired.com/2004/02/quiet/ https://www.wired.com/2004/02/quiet/
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  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-expensive-spiritual-boundaries-that-surround-canadian-cities https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-invisible-and-often...
  - TT3351 6y ago
    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-york-new-york https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-manhattan-eruv-new-y...
  - robocat 6y ago
    > The Toronto eruv alone is estimated to cost $100,000 per year > But being difficult to maintain is kind of the point. Why not implement it as an optical fibre? Non-conducting and easy to continuously check that there are no breaks.
rwmj 6y ago
I had a running machine that reliably took out ADSL in my house. I didn't find out if it did that for the neighbours too, but it wouldn't surprise me. Cured by using a mains conditioner / RF filter (https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B000PS5700 https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B000PS5700)
mellosouls 6y ago
The embarrassed householder promised not to use the television again. I hope the cable company bought the "mortified" TV owner (possibly old/poor) a new TV because they've done nothing obviously wrong.
- thinkloop 6y ago
  > 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 https://www.fcc.gov/general/jammer-enforcement
  - mellosouls 6y ago
    If they clicked on the "jam public signals village-wide" labelled button rather than the "on" button, fair enough.
  - fredley 6y ago
    When's the last time you checked if any of your electronics were emitting a jamming signal?
    - thinkloop 6y ago
      Never, you? If I did though and found that one of my devices was harming my neighbors I wouldn't expect gifts.
      - mellosouls 6y ago
        It's not just that, its the way they have been made to feel they are at fault for using a device in good faith presumably for many years, with a news story plastered all over the world about how they've caused problems (even though they are - as yet - anonymous). 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.
popotamonga 6y ago
Everytime i turn on my fan, my computer screen goes black for 2 seconds, only when used on same outlet.
- encom 6y ago
  Back in Windows 98 times, I had bought a new halogen desk lamp. I put it on my desk, turned it on, and my machine promptly BSODed. It was reproducible as well. The switch on that lamp was effectively a "push here for BSOD" device. 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.
  - nfriedly 6y ago
    > opposite of a voltage spike "Voltage drop" or "brownout"
- LeonM 6y ago
  That's not RF interference, but a phenomenon known as brownout [0]. 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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownout_(electricity) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownout_(electricity)
  - encom 6y ago
    Electrician here. Measure voltage at the outlet. It should be +/- 10% of nominal voltage. Eg. 207-253 in 230 volt land. You have to measure under load, so plug in some high current device. If voltage drops below 207 while a resistive heater is running, call somebody.
foxdev 6y ago
Relevant story time! 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.
- w0mbat 6y ago
  Sounds like fitting either house (or ideally both) with a $15 POE filter from Amazon would have fixed the problem. (POE in this case is point-of-entry not power-over-ethernet.) I had to get one to make MOCA (ethernet over cable) work in my current house.
JdeBP 6y ago
It's interesting comparing the stories on this from various sources. Sometimes M. Jones is an engineer for OpenReach; sometimes xe is an unspecified engineer. The television is sometimes "old"; sometimes "second-hand" (which doesn't necessarily mean old). Sometimes it is the householder who is old, referred to in some newspapers as an Old Age Pensioner. A few reports say things that the BBC does not, which have come 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-tv-causes-broadband-outages-in-village-for-18-months/ 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-broadband-for-entire-village/ https://www.openreach.com/news/second-hand-tv-wipes-out-broa...
- JdeBP 6y ago
  Addendum: The only major exception here, to just recycling a press release with no other sources and no attribution (and making up things like "pensioner") or recyling the BBC report, seems to be Simon Sharwood of The Register, who did some legwork to obtain from an ISP a quote explaining SHINE, and that a AM radio can detect it; and attributed things to "Openreach's statement". * https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/22/old_tv_broke_broadband/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/22/old_tv_broke_broadban...
- jdofaz 6y ago
  Eye roll at their advice: "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.
- buzzert 6y ago
  Just imagine what happens with political stories.
tumetab1 6y ago
Is the broadband ASDL, fiber or something else? I can tell from the news report.
ethanwillis 6y ago
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 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.
- milankragujevic 6y ago
  This is one of the most interesting and intriguing yet improbable stories I have ever read. Thanks for sharing. 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.
andi999 6y ago
18 month? What were they doing? A spectrum analyser is standard equipment.
- naz 6y ago
  This is Openreach we're talking about. Everything happens in 6 month intervals. So those 18 months were likely: 6 months to realize there's a problem, 6 months to assign a contractor to the ticket, 6 months before their next availability for the job.
  - andi999 6y ago
    Thanks. Finding out by the 3rd appointment sounds about right ;-)
cm2187 6y ago
I had something similar in my previous flat. The phone cable was going through the living room under the wooden floor, and passing right underneath my big plasma TV. Every time the TV would display a big white screen, the DSL would disconnect (you can imagine the experience of playing games online). Problem went away when I replaced it with an LED TV.
- mercora 6y ago
  are you really sure the problem was caused by the TV and not just exposed by it?
  - cm2187 6y ago
    I have not pulled the wires out of the floor if it is your question. But the fact that the plasma's interference was causing the disconnection was reproduceable. But I am sure the wires were old / in bad state as was the general state of broadband in London 5 years ago (and still today).
ShradhaSingh 6y ago
I want to know why peoples are paying high for OLD TV's these days. Whats in there?
- detaro 6y ago
  Mostly retro gamers that want to play games/consoles designed for CRTs just as they did back then. Sometimes museums etc to replace them in installations.
- robk 6y ago
  This was probably just a pensioner with a 30 year old tv. Doubt gamers are getting up at 7am to play :)
- Longlius 6y ago
  Most old video game consoles render games internally in 240p and then blank every other scan line. On CRTs, this effect works since the missing lines blend together with the filled in lines but modern TVs will often try to use video processing to 'fill in' these missing lines and even when they don't the effect doesn't look nice on a modern LCD or OLED. 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.
- drdeadringer 6y ago
  I wanted to own a Videosphere, but then again I'm not everybody.
dt3ft 6y ago
Like clockwork at 7? Seems impossible. Who turns on their tv exactly at 7.00 every day? Something does not add up here.
- Famicoman 6y ago
  I have a television that's about 20 years old with a built in timer to turn it on. I used it as an alarm clock back in school because I wanted to watch the news every morning anyway and it was much harder to "snooze" than a normal alarm clock.
- tonyhb 6y ago
  Older generations that use TV magazines to plan their schedule. This old TV doesn't have chromecast or netflix built in for on demand streaming
- capableweb 6y ago
  Why it seems impossible? If you're a fan of a show that starts at 7:00 every day but you don't care about other shows before that, you'd end up in that pattern. Even without watching scheduled TV, if you have a normal day things usually follow the same pattern. Finish work at 17:00, arrive home at 17:30 and all chores done by 19:00, time to watch TV! Doesn't seem too impossible.
  - Izkata 6y ago
    7am, not 7pm, so I'd go with morning news or weather, rather than a scheduled TV show.
- alanbernstein 6y ago
  It's called a routine, it's not really unheard of...
- CodeGlitch 6y ago
  Little old ladies.
grandinj 6y ago
We sell gear to find these kinds of issues. The best story so far, was a little old lady with an ancient table-side lamp, which had a faulty connection, which would sometimes arc, with just the right shape of wire attached to it to broadcast noise all over the GSM bands. 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.
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  I have heard - possibly apocryphal about intermittent interference coming from a budgie swing. The Engineer only noticed this when the little old lady offered him a cuppa and he saw the budgie swing away.
quijoteuniv 6y ago
Is newsworthy because of the Tv or because openreach actually found the problem? I bet he can sell that TV at a high price online. «Watch Tv while disrupting your neighbours internet! «
sschueller 6y ago
18 months? Wouldn't you use the "monitoring device" earlier to diagnose such issues? 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.
Zenst 6y ago
One of my favourite outages was my TV cable - I was sat in a government NOC and called them during lunch. Was lucky I had a phone that had a loudspeaker (was late 90's) and was able to share the excuse for poor intermittent reception - "Sir, your signal is poor as you live on a hill and the it has problems going up hill thru the cable". 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.
cheese_van 6y ago
Some many years ago, I was the source of interference. Newly hired by a federal employer who considered morse code an asset, I practiced in my hotel room. Bored, I decided to go live with a small tune-able antenna inside my hotel room, ground to a sink pipe. Yes, I was an idiot, and still am, but older and wiser. Anyway, every time I keyed, every television in the hotel went green in sync with my keying. Green-green-green. Green green. The cleaning lady ratted me out and I got a deserved earful from the hotel.
- saalweachter 6y ago
  Do you ever imagine there was someone in the hotel who knew enough morse code to become paranoid that his TV was trying to relay secret messages to him?
- korethr 6y ago
  > Newly hired by a federal employer who considered morse code an asset, I practiced in my hotel room. Bored, I decided to go live with a small tune-able antenna inside my hotel room, ground to a sink pipe. Yes, I was an idiot, and still am, but older and wiser. Being ignorant in this area, I am rather curious now: What exactly was your error, and how did it interfere with the TVs? Did the sink pipe become part of your antenna because of it's size, thus turning what you thought was a tiny antenna into a massive antenna with orders of magnitude more gain than you thought? Did you connecting your antenna to the piping end up dumping a bunch of noise into the electrical grounds of the hotel's wiring, enough to mess up the demodulation circuits in the hotels? Something else?
  - cheese_van 6y ago
    Sympathetic resonance with the internal cable network I guess. I merely knew enough to be dangerous, but radio, back in the day, was fun. Having random radio people around the world waiting to talk to another random radio stranger was quite the thrill. And radio was a useful way to learn some basic physics. I was forever disappointed I never got Jordan's King Hussain's QSL card before he died.
shadowgovt 6y ago
Nifty. And nifty that it was a solo pulse, not continuous. I wonder what the mechanism for that interference was?
locao 6y ago
This seems something that would happen only when using friggin old devices, but it happened with me using a brand new bluetooth headphone. Everytime I had an online meeting, my broadband would go down. After the third time I called the telco, the tech guy who was inspecting the cables asked me about my bluetooth devices. He seemed really short of knowledge about computer networks and was just trying to fool me, so I told him I had nothing at home. Later I decided to turn off my headphone and the problem never showed up again. Turns out you can't ignore empirical knowledge.
kitteh 6y ago
Friend of mine in Toronto told me a story how a CRTC (canadian telcom/radio regulator aka like the US FCC) tech was walking around his apt bldg with a spectrum analyzer. Pin pointed an apartment down the hall and was able to make contact and remove the offending device that was bleeding into mobile frequencies. Was a Chinese manufactured baby monitor that was interfering with mobile service. Said they had this problem all over the country with shoddy imports.
codezero 6y ago
I had a buddy who had this happening in rural vermont. He had to get a signal analyzer because nobody believed him and eventually he got the FCC involved which finally got the thing shut off.
bArray 6y ago
> 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.
finphil 6y ago
Hopefully this hasn't caused any beefs in the village ╰（‵□′）╯
jhoechtl 6y ago
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?
Stratoscope 6y ago
I had an electrical problem nearly turn into a life-or-death police encounter. At least it felt that way for a moment. 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!
- spiritplumber 6y ago
  Back in the mid 90s the school I went to still had rotary phones, with a lock on the number 3 so that someone without the key could still dial 112 (emergency number). 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.
Magnets 6y ago
I used to monitor SNR on my DSL line and my neighbours old diesel engine 200ft away would cause it to drop slightly but enough to notice
Animats 6y ago
And nobody has a spectrum analyzer. 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-Handheld-RF-Spectrum-Analyzer_62044481019.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Foxtech-Portable-Hand...

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.

bayindirh 6y ago
> that presumably shows up in the logs Ah, no. SNR problems in the shared medium is not something wathced or logged. I remember losing internet connection on heavy rains sometimes because an odd cable shorted at an underground gallery. It wasn't FTTX then, so it was not easy to find. > You have a problem that's repeatable right on schedule. Similar problems rooted to bandwidth scarcity happened all the time, so in a 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.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  > SNR problems in the shared medium is not something wathced or logged 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?
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    > 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. 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.
    - Nextgrid 6y ago
      > because normal procedures didn't fix anything 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)
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  This is openretch (openreach) not Virgin so not sure where you get shared medium from 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.
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    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.
    - milankragujevic 6y ago
      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 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.
      - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
        By that you mean GPON, I guess? Not so here, where it is PTP. And an ISP with excellent peering.
        milankragujevic 6y ago
        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.
- lima 6y ago
  > Ah, no. SNR problems in the shared medium is not something wathced or logged. A good ISP definitely does monitor SNR. It's a basic metric available from each individual customer device.
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    > 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).
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - lima 6y ago
      They still have SNR metrics on their end of the connection. 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.
- JosephRedfern 6y ago
  > 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. 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?
- tonyb 6y ago
  This isn’t accurate. The amount of data available on a DOCSIS network is incredible. Per modem SNR, power levels, preEq data, etc. If the data is used properly it cans find a loose screw on a tap or a damaged cable down the the foot. That being said impulse noise is one of the harder things to track down. If the modern tools don’t work most MSOs would end up doing the “unplug a leg and see if the SNR gets better” method until they found the offending house.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
considering the thousands of bad ux experiences to outright bugs I encounter every day, considering that some of them are bugs that have lasted for more than a year, considering I just wrote up a 20 page proposal on fixing the search for a pretty big Scandinavian site is obviously costing them money by not having it fixed on stuff that has been the same way for years, considering the governmental sites I am forced to use that are abusively bad and that companies put up job advertisements bragging about how they made these sites and that if you come work for them you will get to work on those sites as well... 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!
aussieguy1234 6y ago
It's not surprising. As a software engineer I've seen bugs that took days to track down which were fixed with a single line of code.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  With removing a single line of code, and in some cases even just a spurious period or comma.
kn100 6y ago
You'd be surprised how hard it is to identify SHINE. In places like this, you'll probably find the fastest broadband available is actually ADSL2+ - which is highly susceptible to noise, and in some places in the UK the lines which run to peoples houses aren't even copper, they're ALU - which is obviously not ideal. Even the tiniest of things can have an enormous impact on line performance. 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.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  > I worked at a UK ISP a couple years back and lets just say the 'monitoring' that ISPS have is extremely limited. 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.
  - donalhunt 6y ago
    Many years ago when I was having cable modem issues, I used to scrape the SNMP off the modem and map stuff like that locally. Was very helpful when diagnosing issues with Level 1 support. "yes... it happens 20 times a day at these times..." 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"). :(
dwd 6y ago
Interference is probably way down the list of potential causes. 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.
xenadu02 6y ago
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.
- mannykannot 6y ago
  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.
aaron695 6y ago
Can you explain what has happened here at a technical level? 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.
stoobs 6y ago
Short answer - it's BT. 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
- memsom 6y ago
  No it is worse than that, it is Openreach. BT spun them off, and they are not the same company anymore - this was to avoid being told they had a monopoly on the lines. But in truth, BT get a lot more priority with Openreach than any other provider, but the quality of the service Openreach provides is inadequate at best anyway. 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.
  - sgt101 6y ago
    You get what you pay for from Openreach - or more precisely the service provider pays little, and tells you it's Openreach while you pay lots. Sky and BT retail definitely pay for the top options of services.
andybak 6y ago
It probably takes 18 months to get a support case escalated to the point where a real engineer looks at it.
- jve 6y ago
  Probably. From the wording in article they BEGAN solving the issue after 18 months. But then, it was only after some cable has been replaced - that could have taken a while to plan, budget and actually do, then again collect feedback. > After 18 months engineers began an investigation after a cable replacement programme failed to fix the issue.
Macha 6y ago
In Ireland, not the UK, but from what I hear the ISP market is pretty similar. 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.
awalton 6y ago
> 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. 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."
unnouinceput 6y ago
Here is your explanation. They didn't care.

mschuster91 6y ago

The joys of shared medium. IIRC, AVM FritzBox'es with cable modems are ridiculously locked down compared to their DSL counterparts to prevent people from hacking the DOCSIS transmitters to flood the cable with junk.

Nextgrid 6y ago
> hacking the DOCSIS transmitters to flood the cable with junk 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?
- brna 6y ago
  Why mains? https://youtu.be/9M_OX-O9JKk https://youtu.be/9M_OX-O9JKk
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > 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.

nottorp 6y ago

Fiber is immune to this kind of thing isn't it? So it's posssibly more of a story about the ISP being cheap.

bayindirh 6y ago
There might be fiber running up the village. 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.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  > running fiber to every home is not very wise, even for long term. 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.
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    > Old copper will keep deteriorating and spending money repairing it is a waste. 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).
    - fomine3 6y ago
      How deploying fiber more becomes economical? I expect the cost won't decrease much unlike semiconductor. So If it won't be more economical, faster replacement is better strategy.

andrea92 6y ago

Lol, that sounds like such a weird case :D no wonder it took so long...

dwd 6y ago
Reminded me of the problem the Parkes observatory had for many years with unidentified radio signals https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2015/04/10/rogue-microwave-ovens-are-the-culprits-behind-mysterious-radio-signals/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2015/04...
SummerlyMars 6y ago
It reminds me of a grocery store parking lot that seemingly prevented car key fobs from working. There's a link to the explanation in the article, but it's about as light on details as the BBC article, unfortunately. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/carstairs-westview-co-op-grocery-car-key-fob-1.4999558 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/carstairs-westview-co...
zhrvoj 6y ago
Fake news with so many flaws - others listed them above. Simple goal to put blame on old analog equipment. Just buy digitaal...digitaaalll...whooo... (so that we can control every each one of you).

hellweaver666 6y ago

I remember back when I worked support for a broadband supplier, long-term "unsolvable" problems were almost always related to dodgy electronic devices in the house. Most common of all was Christmas lights! (you would be surprised how many people put them up in October!)

implements 6y ago
Power sockets with built-in usb charging ports also emit a fair bit of RF interference - we had to move the kitchen radio because of it.
- hunta2097 6y ago
  Ungrounded (floating) switching power supplies can emit a lot of high frequency noise. Unfortunately this is the majority of PSUs these days.
- H1Supreme 6y ago
  Ran into a problem in my studio (audio recording) earlier this month because of a powered USB hub with charging ports. I kept getting this faint rhythmic ticking noise in my guitars. 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.

cs02rm0 6y ago

I naively thought this was going to be somewhere like rural India, not the UK (albeit relatively rural Wales). I'm forever calling out engineers because the line crackles to the point it's difficult to take a call and my internet speed drops from ~65Mbps to ~10. Maybe I should start looking for old TVs. Somehow, being on a road where the houses were only built 5 years ago we have copper lines and on my side of the 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.

dan1234 6y ago
On my street, my house is one of 4 connected directly to the exchange instead of a cabinet, which means I can't get fibre (only FTTC is available here). BT/Openreach/Whoever aren't interested in changing this, but luckily I can get Virgin Media (overpriced IMO, but better than the 20Mb alternative).
- ChildOfChaos 6y ago
  I have the same, but can't get Virgin. 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!
- tialaramex 6y ago
  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.
  - sippingjippers 6y ago
    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 case much lower than that. 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

gpuhacker 6y ago

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

andreasley 6y ago
Or microwave ovens posing as astronomical objects [1]. [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/astrophysics/microwave-ovens-posing-as-astronomical-objects https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/astrophysics/m...
steanne 6y ago
they did the same thing in west virginia with a heating pad. https://www.wired.com/2004/02/quiet/ https://www.wired.com/2004/02/quiet/
Scoundreller 6y ago
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-expensive-spiritual-boundaries-that-surround-canadian-cities https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-invisible-and-often...
- TT3351 6y ago
  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-york-new-york https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-manhattan-eruv-new-y...
- robocat 6y ago
  > The Toronto eruv alone is estimated to cost $100,000 per year > But being difficult to maintain is kind of the point. Why not implement it as an optical fibre? Non-conducting and easy to continuously check that there are no breaks.

rwmj 6y ago

I had a running machine that reliably took out ADSL in my house. I didn't find out if it did that for the neighbours too, but it wouldn't surprise me. Cured by using a mains conditioner / RF filter (https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B000PS5700 https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B000PS5700)

mellosouls 6y ago

The embarrassed householder promised not to use the television again. I hope the cable company bought the "mortified" TV owner (possibly old/poor) a new TV because they've done nothing obviously wrong.

thinkloop 6y ago
> 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 https://www.fcc.gov/general/jammer-enforcement
- mellosouls 6y ago
  If they clicked on the "jam public signals village-wide" labelled button rather than the "on" button, fair enough.
- fredley 6y ago
  When's the last time you checked if any of your electronics were emitting a jamming signal?
  - thinkloop 6y ago
    Never, you? If I did though and found that one of my devices was harming my neighbors I wouldn't expect gifts.
    - mellosouls 6y ago
      It's not just that, its the way they have been made to feel they are at fault for using a device in good faith presumably for many years, with a news story plastered all over the world about how they've caused problems (even though they are - as yet - anonymous). 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.

popotamonga 6y ago

Everytime i turn on my fan, my computer screen goes black for 2 seconds, only when used on same outlet.

encom 6y ago
Back in Windows 98 times, I had bought a new halogen desk lamp. I put it on my desk, turned it on, and my machine promptly BSODed. It was reproducible as well. The switch on that lamp was effectively a "push here for BSOD" device. 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.
- nfriedly 6y ago
  > opposite of a voltage spike "Voltage drop" or "brownout"
LeonM 6y ago
That's not RF interference, but a phenomenon known as brownout [0]. 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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownout_(electricity) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownout_(electricity)
- encom 6y ago
  Electrician here. Measure voltage at the outlet. It should be +/- 10% of nominal voltage. Eg. 207-253 in 230 volt land. You have to measure under load, so plug in some high current device. If voltage drops below 207 while a resistive heater is running, call somebody.

foxdev 6y ago

Relevant story time! 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.

w0mbat 6y ago
Sounds like fitting either house (or ideally both) with a $15 POE filter from Amazon would have fixed the problem. (POE in this case is point-of-entry not power-over-ethernet.) I had to get one to make MOCA (ethernet over cable) work in my current house.

JdeBP 6y ago

It's interesting comparing the stories on this from various sources. Sometimes M. Jones is an engineer for OpenReach; sometimes xe is an unspecified engineer. The television is sometimes "old"; sometimes "second-hand" (which doesn't necessarily mean old). Sometimes it is the householder who is old, referred to in some newspapers as an Old Age Pensioner. A few reports say things that the BBC does not, which have come 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-tv-causes-broadband-outages-in-village-for-18-months/ 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-broadband-for-entire-village/ https://www.openreach.com/news/second-hand-tv-wipes-out-broa...

JdeBP 6y ago
Addendum: The only major exception here, to just recycling a press release with no other sources and no attribution (and making up things like "pensioner") or recyling the BBC report, seems to be Simon Sharwood of The Register, who did some legwork to obtain from an ISP a quote explaining SHINE, and that a AM radio can detect it; and attributed things to "Openreach's statement". * https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/22/old_tv_broke_broadband/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/22/old_tv_broke_broadban...
jdofaz 6y ago
Eye roll at their advice: "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.
buzzert 6y ago
Just imagine what happens with political stories.

tumetab1 6y ago

Is the broadband ASDL, fiber or something else? I can tell from the news report.

ethanwillis 6y ago

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 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.

milankragujevic 6y ago
This is one of the most interesting and intriguing yet improbable stories I have ever read. Thanks for sharing. 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.

andi999 6y ago

18 month? What were they doing? A spectrum analyser is standard equipment.

naz 6y ago
This is Openreach we're talking about. Everything happens in 6 month intervals. So those 18 months were likely: 6 months to realize there's a problem, 6 months to assign a contractor to the ticket, 6 months before their next availability for the job.
- andi999 6y ago
  Thanks. Finding out by the 3rd appointment sounds about right ;-)

cm2187 6y ago

I had something similar in my previous flat. The phone cable was going through the living room under the wooden floor, and passing right underneath my big plasma TV. Every time the TV would display a big white screen, the DSL would disconnect (you can imagine the experience of playing games online). Problem went away when I replaced it with an LED TV.

mercora 6y ago
are you really sure the problem was caused by the TV and not just exposed by it?
- cm2187 6y ago
  I have not pulled the wires out of the floor if it is your question. But the fact that the plasma's interference was causing the disconnection was reproduceable. But I am sure the wires were old / in bad state as was the general state of broadband in London 5 years ago (and still today).

ShradhaSingh 6y ago

I want to know why peoples are paying high for OLD TV's these days. Whats in there?

detaro 6y ago
Mostly retro gamers that want to play games/consoles designed for CRTs just as they did back then. Sometimes museums etc to replace them in installations.
robk 6y ago
This was probably just a pensioner with a 30 year old tv. Doubt gamers are getting up at 7am to play :)
Longlius 6y ago
Most old video game consoles render games internally in 240p and then blank every other scan line. On CRTs, this effect works since the missing lines blend together with the filled in lines but modern TVs will often try to use video processing to 'fill in' these missing lines and even when they don't the effect doesn't look nice on a modern LCD or OLED. 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.
drdeadringer 6y ago
I wanted to own a Videosphere, but then again I'm not everybody.

dt3ft 6y ago

Like clockwork at 7? Seems impossible. Who turns on their tv exactly at 7.00 every day? Something does not add up here.

Famicoman 6y ago
I have a television that's about 20 years old with a built in timer to turn it on. I used it as an alarm clock back in school because I wanted to watch the news every morning anyway and it was much harder to "snooze" than a normal alarm clock.
tonyhb 6y ago
Older generations that use TV magazines to plan their schedule. This old TV doesn't have chromecast or netflix built in for on demand streaming
capableweb 6y ago
Why it seems impossible? If you're a fan of a show that starts at 7:00 every day but you don't care about other shows before that, you'd end up in that pattern. Even without watching scheduled TV, if you have a normal day things usually follow the same pattern. Finish work at 17:00, arrive home at 17:30 and all chores done by 19:00, time to watch TV! Doesn't seem too impossible.
- Izkata 6y ago
  7am, not 7pm, so I'd go with morning news or weather, rather than a scheduled TV show.
alanbernstein 6y ago
It's called a routine, it's not really unheard of...
CodeGlitch 6y ago
Little old ladies.

grandinj 6y ago

We sell gear to find these kinds of issues. The best story so far, was a little old lady with an ancient table-side lamp, which had a faulty connection, which would sometimes arc, with just the right shape of wire attached to it to broadcast noise all over the GSM bands. 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.

C1sc0cat 6y ago
I have heard - possibly apocryphal about intermittent interference coming from a budgie swing. The Engineer only noticed this when the little old lady offered him a cuppa and he saw the budgie swing away.

quijoteuniv 6y ago

Is newsworthy because of the Tv or because openreach actually found the problem? I bet he can sell that TV at a high price online. «Watch Tv while disrupting your neighbours internet! «

sschueller 6y ago

18 months? Wouldn't you use the "monitoring device" earlier to diagnose such issues? 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.

Zenst 6y ago

One of my favourite outages was my TV cable - I was sat in a government NOC and called them during lunch. Was lucky I had a phone that had a loudspeaker (was late 90's) and was able to share the excuse for poor intermittent reception - "Sir, your signal is poor as you live on a hill and the it has problems going up hill thru the cable". 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.

cheese_van 6y ago

Some many years ago, I was the source of interference. Newly hired by a federal employer who considered morse code an asset, I practiced in my hotel room. Bored, I decided to go live with a small tune-able antenna inside my hotel room, ground to a sink pipe. Yes, I was an idiot, and still am, but older and wiser. Anyway, every time I keyed, every television in the hotel went green in sync with my keying. Green-green-green. Green green. The cleaning lady ratted me out and I got a deserved earful from the hotel.

saalweachter 6y ago
Do you ever imagine there was someone in the hotel who knew enough morse code to become paranoid that his TV was trying to relay secret messages to him?
korethr 6y ago
> Newly hired by a federal employer who considered morse code an asset, I practiced in my hotel room. Bored, I decided to go live with a small tune-able antenna inside my hotel room, ground to a sink pipe. Yes, I was an idiot, and still am, but older and wiser. Being ignorant in this area, I am rather curious now: What exactly was your error, and how did it interfere with the TVs? Did the sink pipe become part of your antenna because of it's size, thus turning what you thought was a tiny antenna into a massive antenna with orders of magnitude more gain than you thought? Did you connecting your antenna to the piping end up dumping a bunch of noise into the electrical grounds of the hotel's wiring, enough to mess up the demodulation circuits in the hotels? Something else?
- cheese_van 6y ago
  Sympathetic resonance with the internal cable network I guess. I merely knew enough to be dangerous, but radio, back in the day, was fun. Having random radio people around the world waiting to talk to another random radio stranger was quite the thrill. And radio was a useful way to learn some basic physics. I was forever disappointed I never got Jordan's King Hussain's QSL card before he died.

shadowgovt 6y ago

Nifty. And nifty that it was a solo pulse, not continuous. I wonder what the mechanism for that interference was?

locao 6y ago

This seems something that would happen only when using friggin old devices, but it happened with me using a brand new bluetooth headphone. Everytime I had an online meeting, my broadband would go down. After the third time I called the telco, the tech guy who was inspecting the cables asked me about my bluetooth devices. He seemed really short of knowledge about computer networks and was just trying to fool me, so I told him I had nothing at home. Later I decided to turn off my headphone and the problem never showed up again. Turns out you can't ignore empirical knowledge.

kitteh 6y ago

Friend of mine in Toronto told me a story how a CRTC (canadian telcom/radio regulator aka like the US FCC) tech was walking around his apt bldg with a spectrum analyzer. Pin pointed an apartment down the hall and was able to make contact and remove the offending device that was bleeding into mobile frequencies. Was a Chinese manufactured baby monitor that was interfering with mobile service. Said they had this problem all over the country with shoddy imports.

codezero 6y ago

I had a buddy who had this happening in rural vermont. He had to get a signal analyzer because nobody believed him and eventually he got the FCC involved which finally got the thing shut off.

bArray 6y ago

> 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.

finphil 6y ago

Hopefully this hasn't caused any beefs in the village ╰（‵□′）╯

jhoechtl 6y ago

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?

Stratoscope 6y ago

I had an electrical problem nearly turn into a life-or-death police encounter. At least it felt that way for a moment. 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!

spiritplumber 6y ago
Back in the mid 90s the school I went to still had rotary phones, with a lock on the number 3 so that someone without the key could still dial 112 (emergency number). 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.

Magnets 6y ago

I used to monitor SNR on my DSL line and my neighbours old diesel engine 200ft away would cause it to drop slightly but enough to notice

Animats 6y ago

And nobody has a spectrum analyzer. 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-Handheld-RF-Spectrum-Analyzer_62044481019.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Foxtech-Portable-Hand...