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News from the BBC of a SHINE (single high-level impulse noise)[*] that interfered with a Welsh village's internet connection on a daily basis.
The mystery of why an entire village lost its broadband every morning at 7am was solved when engineers discovered an old television was to blame.
[...] After 18 months engineers began an investigation after a cable replacement programme failed to fix the issue.
[...] Openreach engineers were baffled by the continuous problem and it wasn't until they used a monitoring device that they found the fault.
The householder would switch their TV set on at 7am every morning[sic] - and electrical interference emitted by their second-hand television was affecting the broadband signal.
The owner, who does not want to be identified, was "mortified" to find out their old TV was causing the problem, according to Openreach.
"They immediately agreed to switch it off and not use it again," said engineer Michael Jones.
While some properties in the surrounding area have Fibre to the Premises, several homes in the Aberhosan area are still limited to using copper-based ADSL connections.
[*] Broadband: Understanding REIN and SHINE.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Snotnose on Wednesday September 23 2020, @03:13PM (13 children)
If my TV can bring down my village's broadband I'd be thoroughly pissed off at the company providing said broadband. In fact, I'd try to convince my fellow villagers to tar and feather the broadband supplier, then run them out of town for sheer incompetence.
I came. I saw. I forgot why I came.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 23 2020, @03:49PM
Beyond that, I'd be pretty pissed that it took 18 months to sort out this problem. What ever happened to determined problem solving--sticking with it until you fix it? I could see it taking a week to escalate to the level of putting a recording device on the line, but after that it shouldn't be more than a couple of days to see that there is some big source of external noise.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by rigrig on Wednesday September 23 2020, @03:49PM (5 children)
My guess is this was cable internet, not much the broadband supplier can do about some device sending massive noise down the village-wide shared line.
Well, except sending down some people to locate the offending device and offering the owner the choice between disconnecting the device, or disconnection of the line.
The idea that daily outages at 7am would be caused by faulty wiring rather than some device interfering doesn't scream "competence" though.
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Freeman on Wednesday September 23 2020, @03:59PM
It was DSL, which has similar problems, apparently.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Funny) by DannyB on Wednesday September 23 2020, @04:01PM (3 children)
Number 6 could complain. Number 2 could strategically insert a filter in the offending customer's broadband line to block the offending noise from escaping back out to the entire Village. Number 1 would investigate whether the CRT was part of some kind of escape attempt.
Young people won't believe you if you say you used to get Netflix by US Postal Mail.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by pipedwho on Wednesday September 23 2020, @10:17PM (2 children)
I am not a number, I am a free man!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2020, @02:43AM (1 child)
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed, or numbered!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2020, @12:42PM
Nor will I be folded, spindled or mutilated!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 23 2020, @03:57PM (1 child)
Be a little more patient with the broadband supplier. After all, they did have to invent a spectrum analyzer in order to find the problem.
Young people won't believe you if you say you used to get Netflix by US Postal Mail.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 23 2020, @07:45PM
Can you even imagine?
When the technician would turn on the spectrum analyzer, they would first have to watch a series of commercials and ads on top of those commercials, which the operator wouldn't be able to skip, suppress, nor fast forward before any spectrums can be analyzed. Mute would also be disabled with a mandatory volume level set to 11 on top of the already level 11 of the recorded Billy Mays style of shouting. You're also not allowed to buy the analyzer, and instead must rent it, forever, at what ever price they wish, plus taxes, plus fees, plus cramming charges. At this point you're so exhausted you forgot what you were even trying to do to begin with, so you just give up and before you know it, 18 freaking months have gone by.
Bollocks!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 23 2020, @05:09PM (3 children)
I wouldn't be pissed that some old very EMI noisy device brought down the modern ultra-high bandwidth connection, what I would be pissed about is that it took them 18 MONTHS to figure it out.
7am like clockwork, small village - an interview process might have solved that faster.
SpecAn - pretty standard kit, once that came online it should have been solved inside a week.
Upgrading all the cable - probably needed it anyway, might give them a pass for that, but they still should have brought in the SpecAn even before all the cable got replaced.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2020, @12:46AM (2 children)
it is now easy to point fingers, but place yourself in the villager, a ISP support and the ISP engineer
villager: small problem for some 1 or 2 minutes, so no pressure to really have this fixed in hurry
ISP support: small problem on some customers, monitoring on their side, request check the client house, request check the cables
engineer: minor issue, so recheck basic problems, try to find range of the problem. still no solution... yep, lets find time to be in the village around 7am to debug this... and they do that several times to try to triangulate the emission source
i suspect that probably the 18 months was basically pushing the problem around until someone finally find some poor guy to be in a remote village at 7am to better debug a weird but minor problem.
Several years ago, my company had visit of the police and telco regulator because one mobile operator complained that something was creating interference with their signal in the area (there are several of then, only one complained) and only after many months they could pin point that it was a laptop docker station in our company the source of the problem (that was disconnected and replaced later by the builder)
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 24 2020, @02:10AM (1 child)
Yes, this is exactly how Comcast operates, and it borders on criminally negligent.
We had an intermittent outage for nearly 18 months at our home - not the entire village, but our entire village. Anyway, it flakes out for a minute, or an hour, or off and on for six hours, then it gets better. After 3 months we correlated it to rain: wet soil seemed to make it worse. Many, many service calls - they would take a month, sometimes two to send somebody out and when they were here we'd have "good signal" so they'd check the coocoo box on their form and go away again. Finally, as one of the service was driving away the service flaked out, I ran him down on my bike before he got away, turned him around and sure enough: when he attached his tester it confirmed what we had been saying for over a year: bad connection, intermittent. So, right then right there he ran a temporary drop from the pole to the house and that fixed it, with a promise that somebody would be around to bury the cable he left on the surface of the yard "in a day or two." Five service calls and 9 months later, they finally sent somebody to actually bury it after I presented in person at the sales/service office and told the story loud and clear in front of other customers.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2020, @04:57AM
To help the next people that run into this, do two things: 1. Learn the access credentials to the modem so you can monitor it yourself and record the time and signal levels when it drops. 2. Request end-of-llne monitoring or reduction of the reporting interval from your site (this will be called different things depending on the ISP in question), which they can do if you escalate it enough despite their initial claims they cannot.
And if you ever get a line that won't be buried, first try contacting them repeatedly publicly on Twitter or other social media. If that doesn't work, call the report number for exposed utilities from someone else's number not on your account because those numbers often go directly to the subcontractor but if they don't having someone else complain will help in case it is a dreaded HOA. If that doesn't work, complain to the city about the easement violation, as the city's threats to collect fines might be motivating. If that doesn't work, your state's utility board has even more power over them on paper. If that doesn't work, contact a local news station's consumer advocate reporter. They love filling otherwise dead air by naming and shaming the local utilities, especially if it could turn into a big story because people repeatedly contact them with the same problem.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by SomeGuy on Wednesday September 23 2020, @03:57PM (25 children)
This story sounds like complete bullshit.
- If we are talking about a WIRED internet connection, that should be not very possible.
- Even if we are talking about a WIRELESS internet connection, it should not have taken that long to find the source of the interference.
- To knock out that an entire village (wait, how many people are in this "village?") especially a wired connection, would require quite a bit of power.
- I have a hard time imagining any TV failing that badly unless we are talking about a very early vacuum tube TV (not even talking about the CRT).
- If their equipment is that fragile, then any damaged equipment can take it out. I've had all kinds of interference problems from cheap Chinese power adapters. Have you noticed how much RF interference cheap LED lightbulbs put off?
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday September 23 2020, @04:01PM (1 child)
Some types of connections are highly susceptible to electromagnetic interference. An old CRT TV that's on the fritz or maybe just a normal poorly made one, is apparently enough to cause problems. Usually not to the extent of an entire town, though.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday September 23 2020, @04:56PM
Another news site [mirror.co.uk] (with too much javascript) has since written about the incident, and describes it as a 16" Bush brand television, which they'd bought second-hand for ₤30.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 23 2020, @04:04PM
If we were talking about a Comcast WEIRD internet connection, you wouldn't be saying that.
You mean if their equipment is that
cheapprofitable to the investors.Young people won't believe you if you say you used to get Netflix by US Postal Mail.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Wednesday September 23 2020, @04:35PM (17 children)
You've got a broken assumption here, that all cathode ray tubes are made equal.
The bigger the screen, and more importantly the shorter the projection depth, the more power of EM radiation it will put out. The power increases with the tangent of the angle of beam deflection. At 90 degrees, e.g. the power output would be infinite. In the 90s before flat screens started showing up, "big screen" tvs were pushing that boundary to "be less bulky". Throw a couple particularly lazy engineers at it, and you're dumping the household fuse limit of 30 amps around as a 50 hz oscillating cathode.
On a UK 230 volt home power supply, that's 7000 watts, well over 10 times the legal power limit of a single channel radio.
Now, hopefully 30 amps is an exaggeration, but I bet it's pretty damn high.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday September 23 2020, @04:46PM (14 children)
All UK household appliances have a fuse fitted in the socket, rated between 3A and 13A depending on the device. So you shouldn't be able to pull more than 4000W continuously.
It's still more than enough to cause havoc, though.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday September 23 2020, @09:15PM (3 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 23 2020, @11:36PM (1 child)
Integrated fused spur - still available. [amazon.co.uk]
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday September 25 2020, @07:01AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Thursday September 24 2020, @05:21AM
Beg your pardon, yes, plug. Typing too fast and too little proofreading...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2020, @12:02AM (9 children)
A typical 32A ring circuit allows ~7.4kW but the most you'll be drawing through a single fused 13A UK domestic plug is ~3kW.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2020, @12:08AM (8 children)
Can anyone explain why UK residential wiring is "A typical 32A ring circuit"?
Over here in N. America we run branches out from the main panel (circuit breakers) to devices or outlets. Nothing comes back to the panel in a ring.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2020, @12:35AM (7 children)
It enables the use of installation cable with smaller diameter conductors since the current is pulled in both directions. Ring circuits ("ring mains") have fallen out of favor because a break in the circuit could mean potentially pulling a full 32A over ~20A (2.5mm2) rated cable. Radial circuits and spurs are also widely used, most high power appliances (oven, shower) would be on a dedicated radial.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2020, @02:20AM (6 children)
Ring circuits are falling out of favor in the UK because they are a stupid idea.
Only the UK (and apparently a handful of Third World countries Britain influenced) has these. As the parent indicated, the only motivation for ring circuits as opposed to branches that go straight to the main circuit breaker box is to scrimp out on wire. IT'S A DESIGN TO CHEAP OUT rather than do it right.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Thursday September 24 2020, @05:26AM (5 children)
Cheaping out on copper was appealing when there was a LOT of rebuilding and rewiring houses to do in the aftermath of the second world war. As stated, it's no longer such a concern.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2020, @06:33AM (4 children)
From Wikipedia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_circuit [wikipedia.org]
"Ring circuits are commonly used in British wiring with socket-outlets taking fused plugs to BS 1363. Because the breaker rating is much higher than that of any one socket outlet, the system can only be used with fused plugs or fused appliance outlets."
My God, THAT explains the unique and stupid British power plugs with their built-in fuses; they HAVE to have them because British ring wiring is unsafe by design. LOL!
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Thursday September 24 2020, @01:31PM (2 children)
It's unsafe if you don't put fuses in the plug, yes. But the system was designed to be used with fused plugs, so I don't think that quite warrants "unsafe by design".
Barmier by far is the previous UK standard: BS 546 [wikipedia.org]. In this design, there's no (mandated) fuse in the plug, but you have a different sized plug for each current rating!
BS 546 installations are still permitted by UK electrical regulations, and are usually chosen for their obscurity. I've seen them used in hotels and libraries (for desk lamps), in order to discourage theft or plugging in your own devices. BS 546 also remains standard in stage lighting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2020, @02:55PM (1 child)
Now that you've given me the justification for the UK electrical wiring/plug standard: why do you guys insist on putting separate cold and hot fixtures on your sinks instead of combining the hot and cold into a single fixture? You are condemned to either icy water or scalding water. That is, unless you let the water mix in the probably less than clean plugged basin and splash yourself out of that.
The wiring and plumbing in the UK seem archaic, and proudly so. Like supporting a royal family... ;-)
I assume UK households also have to keep fuses on hand or make trips to the store. Where I live, I just reset the breaker for that circuit at the breaker box--flip a switch. Of course, AFTER trying to guess why it tripped, for safety's sake.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2020, @02:57PM
To bring it back on topic, DSL is archaic too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2020, @11:14PM
The BSI plug and socket is the greatest and safest design in the world and with a fuse per appliance it can be obvious which appliance is failing before the hairdryer starts shooting flames. The breaker on the consumer unit has been an RCD (GFCI) in new installs for a long, long time.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Wednesday September 23 2020, @06:01PM (1 child)
Interesting point. For all we know it was an over 9000 inch TV, or even just an LCD/Plasma screen with a really bad power supply. Of course, it would have been informative if the TFA had given any kind of description of the TV. The entire article comes across as one of those "all old things are bad" propaganda bits.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Thursday September 24 2020, @01:33PM
Other sources have confirmed that it was a second-hand 16" CRT; see https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=39694&page=1&cid=1055652#commentwrap [soylentnews.org] for a comment posted just before yours with further details.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 23 2020, @05:11PM
You underestimate the EMI potential of an old TV set,
and/or you overestimate the EMI resistance performance of commercial gear.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 5, Interesting) by sjames on Wednesday September 23 2020, @05:33PM
Except that it actually happened and is well documented. A long wire is also known as an antenna, after all.
It takes a lot less power than you might think, especially with poorly shielded systems. It's why ethernet uses differential signaling on twisted pairs. Less well designed systems may be vulnerable.
In the early '80s (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth with purple mohawks), I remember seeing interference on channel 5 that seemed like it had some sort of coherent pattern to it. Careful examination revealed that the pattern was, in fact, the screen saver my C64 was displaying in the next room on it's monitor. Amusingly, I was watching Halloween and the screen saver was a jack'o'lantern.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by fakefuck39 on Wednesday September 23 2020, @06:11PM
This is RF spewed out by the TV, going to a phone line as opposed to the coax the TV is using. Maybe the phone line was only an inch by the TV or something like that. LED lightbulbs and power adapters are not something you can compare this to. A large old tube TV can be close to a kilowatt of power. It can create a huge magnetic field that hits an unshielded phone wire.
As far a finding the source of RF - possibly 18 months is too long, but sound fine to me. It takes months of ignored reports to even look into the problem. Then they send engineers to the houses of people reporting the issue to fix their home network. Then after many reports they start looking on their end. By the time you identify the shared wire shit is coming from, it's been months. Now which house is it? How do you know it's RF - there's many possible issues, including your own equipment being the cause.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday September 24 2020, @01:34AM
RFI and EMI is all too common. Back in the day, before the FCC tightened regulations, the Apple II computer I had screwed up TV reception. The computer and TV were in opposite corners of the house, about 100 ft apart, and the computer was still able to add a lot of noise to the signal.
Years later, I tried to turn an old computer into a server running 24/7. The 1G hard drive had some tremendous RFI leakage that made it impossible to receive AM radio stations in the next room. On the radio, you could hear every motion of the arm. It should not have caused such interference, but devices can have defects that cause far more RFI than they're supposed to emit.
Similarly, when I used a 56K modem, I often had a very hard time connecting, and then the connection would be extremely slow. We had close on to a dozen extensions plugged in to the phone jacks that the builder had put in each room. When I started checking them, I found that each phone lowered the connection speed by about 2K. Except for one exceptionally bad phone that was somehow interfering so much I often could not connect at all. It was the same model as several other phones. Unplugging that one phone instantly solved the connection problems my modem was experiencing. Modem was connecting immediately, and achieving at least 30K data rates. Unplugging the rest of the phones allowed the modem to finally reach 56K speeds.
Finally, there was a year when the house next door was vacant. That year we had the best TV reception ever. When new occupants at last moved in, the reception became as bad as usual, and sometimes worse. Could always tell when the neighbors vacuumed.
There have also been many stories of desktop computers that interfered with their own built in audio system.
So, yeah, totally believable that an old TV could cause that much trouble.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 23 2020, @05:24PM
Government experts suspect the lack of a camera and microphone in the set was at fault.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 23 2020, @05:52PM
The old tuning capacitors leak a lot of RF garbage. The old automotive AM radios also had these. You could block radio reception in the cars next to you by tuning slightly off frequency of the station they were listening to. I used to freak people out at stoplights wondering why their radio went silent.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Variable_Capacitor.jpg [wikimedia.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Wednesday September 23 2020, @09:04PM
Reminds me of a phone my father bought in Hong Kong. It worked fine. It just "killed" all the other phones in the house while plugged in, once unplugged the other phones worked again. Phone-company was not amused with our un-tested and rated phone connected to their network.. At least it only plagued our house so it was contained, as far as I know and can remember.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Revek on Thursday September 24 2020, @01:46AM
We never took more than a week to find bad equipment. We would watch the spectrum and when noise jumped in we had guys go out and start pulling pads until we isolated it. If they wouldn't let inspect it we cut their drop loose. We had one guy with a hot tub and at four o'clock every day our node would go off. When we figured out where it was he wouldn't let us look. We cut his drop loose and the next day he found it in his heart to let us inspect his house wiring. As usual we found twist on rg59 connectors and shitty wal mart coax.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 3, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday September 24 2020, @02:25AM
I have seen this in my high school days working as a TV repair tech in the sixties...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=barkhausen+oscillation+horizontal+output+tube [duckduckgo.com]
Lots of UHF emission from the stub of wire leaving the horizontal output tube to the horizontal output transformer.
The tube itself could operate at far higher frequencies, and some of them did. The magic of resonance. Wire inductance and parasitic capacitance. Would emit all sorts of chaotic noise, excited by the flyback pulse.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2020, @02:56AM (1 child)
Why did the BBC take 18 months to drive a TV detector van [wikipedia.org] around the village?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday September 24 2020, @04:02AM
Almost everyone has a TV. Very few have the horizontal oscillator tube prone to barkhausen oscillation.
It was rare. But I've seen it. The wire between the horizontal oscillator tube and the horizontal output transformer is the antenna. The plate capacitance of the horizontal output tube is its resonant capacitor.
Boy, does that thing ever sing.
Watts of GHz RF. Pulsed. At 15,746 KHz. But the energy was in the GHz region. Right during flyback. When this thing was supposed to die out. But it didn't.
All over the GHz band.
This thing confounds many TV repairmen. I got several, too. It wasn't until years later I found out what caused this. At the time, I merely swapped tubes until I found one that worked, and returned the set to the customer.
Now, this was me working during High School working as a TV repairman.
Now, I've seen it before. And really suspect it.
Look here.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]