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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.