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Television Communications The Internet

Old TV Caused Village Broadband Outages For 18 Months (bbc.com) 200

seoras shares a report from the BBC: 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. An unnamed householder in Aberhosan, Powys, was unaware the old set would emit a signal which would interfere with the entire village's broadband. After 18 months engineers began an investigation after a cable replacement program failed to fix the issue. The embarrassed householder promised not to use the television again. The village now has a stable broadband signal. The engineers used a spectrum analyzer to help pinpoint the "electrical noise" that was causing the problem.

"At 7am, like clockwork, it happened," said engineer Michael Jones. "It turned out that at 7am every morning the occupant would switch on their old TV which would, in turn, knock out broadband for the entire village."
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Old TV Caused Village Broadband Outages For 18 Months

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  • Embarrased? Why? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @02:15AM (#60534552)

    The owner, who does not want to be identified, was "mortified" to find out their old TV was causing the problem, according to Openreach.

    Why on Earth would he be mortified? The onus is on the provider to ensure their shit is properly shielded.

    Had I been the homeowner, I'd have told the engineers "Oh good, glad you found the problem. I'll go back to watching Columbo then. Bye now!".

    And if I lived in that village, I'd be properly annoyed that it took the provider so long to find the problem, and even more annoyed if their only solution is to tell the guy to buy a new TV.

    • by dunkelfalke ( 91624 ) on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @02:21AM (#60534572)

      and this is why you don't have friends.

    • It's a village in rural Wales... surprised Openreach could even find it, let alone have installed any sort of broadband cabling already

    • by amorsen ( 7485 )

      How do you propose applying shielding to what is likely almost-a-century-old unshielded twisted pair?

    • Re:Embarrased? Why? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @06:20AM (#60535050) Homepage Journal

      The owner has a responsibility to maintain their equipment and if it malfunctions they can be asked to discontinue use of it.

      Of course it might be working as designed, it's not clear.

      Nice to see that some people still care about the effect they have on the people around them, a rare quality these days.

      • I think you're both right here. It's good to care about your impact, but there should not be any impact. The equipment should be shielded against non-related signals. There should be filters on the wires to prevent non-network frequencies from entering the cabinet, and the cabinet should be shielded to prevent any signals coming in any way other than on a wire. Anything else would be uncivilized.

      • The owner has a responsibility to maintain their equipment and if it malfunctions they can be asked to discontinue use of it.

        Of course it might be working as designed, it's not clear.

        Nice to see that some people still care about the effect they have on the people around them, a rare quality these days.

        The telco could also solve the while issue by simply giving them a new TV. If I lived there I'd happily chip in to buy one if they didn't.

    • I bet you are a very, very shitty neighbor.
    • by cusco ( 717999 )

      Libertarian, eh?

    • Had I been the homeowner, I'd have told the engineers "Oh good, glad you found the problem. I'll go back to watching Columbo then. Bye now!".

      Is that before or after you pay the $11000 fine to the FCC every day you turn the TV on for willful spectrum violations? On the up side your maximum fine is actually capped at $97000 so after you pay that instead of buying a new TV you should be okay to keep being an arse ... at least until the criminal proceedings start in court.

      The "I didn't know the end user is liable for equipment use" excuse doesn't fly.

  • by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @02:36AM (#60534602) Homepage

    It was a very old TV, they emit interference particularly on starting up. The problem was with the piss poor shielding on the broadband system installed. I wouldn't be surprised if broadband went down every time there was RF from nearby lightning too.

    • Considering this is in the UK where Openreach supply DSL and DSL runs over unshielded twisted pairs, just makes you look stupid when talking about something you don't understand.
      • by Viol8 ( 599362 )

        Umm, if you look inside a distribution cupboard you'll see the cables ARE shielded. Over to you genius...

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Properly installed twisted pair catches very little interference. That is the whole point. (Well, one of them.) Sound to me like they have shoddily done cabling.

        • Properly installed twisted pair catches very little interference. That is the whole point. (Well, one of them.)

          Between each wire in the twisted pair, not from an external source. Coaxial cable is the thing that can shield conducting inner wires from an external source. So funny watching Americans comment about a telecoms network they know nothing about.

          • Between each wire in the twisted pair, not from an external source. Coaxial cable is the thing that can shield conducting inner wires from an external source. So funny watching Americans comment about a telecoms network they know nothing about.

            It looks a lot like you've never heard about differential signaling. The signals on twisted pairs are constructed from the difference between the two wires. If both wires have the same noise (from an external source) on them then there is effectively no noise. That's WHY twisted pairs are twisted, so that one wire in the pair won't be closer to a noise source than the other for longer than the distance between two twists. It's also why higher bandwidth over twisted pair requires a higher twist count. Obviou

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        OpenReach has really held the UK back. Fibre roll-out has been extremely slow and they crippled it so you can't even get gigabit speeds. The economic damage from our crappy broadband is incalculable.

        • But you can get gigabit speeds if you're wired up fibre to the premises as I am and almost everywhere has at least fibre to the cabinet giving them 70+mbit, the use of the existing 100 year old copper wire leg from the street cabinet to the property being the thing that restricts the speed. That is in the process of being replaced but our towns and cities are more densely populated and almost every city, town and village in the UK is hundreds of years older than the USA with centuries of infrastructure and
          • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            I have fibre to the cabinet and it's crap. I occasionally get 65mb down but upload is only 20mb.

            The cost including line rental is more than my friends in Tokyo pay for 10 gigabit. In fact they stopped selling DSL years ago there.

      • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

        Ok, so why is the TV knocking out the broadband? Sounds like a pretty bad install to me. You're assuming that they used twisted pairs here but the evidence points to the contrary.

        • by amorsen ( 7485 )

          OpenReach only does twisted pair. It is a safe assumption that all wired broadband in that village is UTP, with the vast majority being unbonded xDSL.

    • The problem was with the piss poor shielding on the broadband system installed.

      Nope. There's only so much you can do to shield from external interference. There's a reason equipment is built and certified to standards which limit the emission of of noise in licensed spectra.

    • by Phics ( 934282 )

      If it was an old CRT, it was probably the initial degaussing when the set turned on. EMF is always fun to troubleshoot where it intersects with IT, since a lot of techs have little to no understanding of the havoc it wreaks, (shielding is typically so much better these days).

      I remember back in the 90's one of the techs my company was working for at the time had an onsite call to a client's office. Their CRT was intermittently but frequently going nuts, (wobbly, distorted). Turns out the computer system w

      • by PPH ( 736903 )

        Yeah. In digging through some other articles on this topic it turns out that they were dealing with single isolated impulse noise, aka SHINE (don't know why the acronym isn't SIN). It's pretty tricky to isolate the source of such interference, since you need equipment connected and monitoring the system when it occurs. And if it only occurs a few times a day, you will have trouble splitting and isolating the system to home in on the source location.

  • by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 ) on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @03:07AM (#60534680)
    But I like to knock out an entire village the old fashioned way. With just a liter of bourbon and my two fists.
  • by imidan ( 559239 ) on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @03:38AM (#60534754)

    The most interesting thing to me in this story is the apparent lack of anyone who knew what they were doing attempting to diagnose the problem in the first place. It seems like we've come to a point where we don't even try to diagnose problems anymore, we just come up with solutions that often work and throw them at problems like spaghetti at a wall. Turn if off and on again. Reset your modem. Exit out and start over.

    When I call phone support for something, I get a minimum-wage drone who has absolutely no knowledge of the technology. All they have is a script. They make me do this and that thing because it's on the script, and it's usually a waste of time, because of course I've already done the easy things to fix it. Has the person on the support line at the ISP ever actually interacted with the web interface for this device they sent me? Of course not. The ISP just hands them the script.

    Why does this problem go on for 18 months, including cable replacement, before an engineer comes out and actually diagnoses the problem? Surely sending a person to the town to actually figure out what's wrong would have been cheaper in the long run, and obviously more effective.

    /rant

    • by Vlad_the_Inhaler ( 32958 ) on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @05:12AM (#60534944)

      According to the version of the story I read - https://www.theguardian.com/uk... [theguardian.com] - they finally sent a team of engineers down to this village to identify the problem.

      “We walked up and down the village in the torrential rain at 6am to see if we could find an electrical noise to support our theory. And at 7am, like clockwork, it happened. Our device picked up a large burst of electrical interference.”

      The population of Aberhosan is around 400 and it is far away from anywhere significantly larger, I think we can assume the company saw this as being low-priority.

    • by r2kordmaa ( 1163933 ) on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @05:40AM (#60534988)
      Frankly you don't pay enough for your consumer service to have someone technically knowledgeable take your call.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The real issue is that the OpenReach network, which is the only option for millions of households, is made of wet string and rust in many places. The equipment is old and out of date, and they are about 15 years behind the curve, more in rural places like this.

      If they had a modern network, not a 20th century one kept going with duct tape and spit, they wouldn't have these kinds of problems. Fibre optics are immune to RF interference.

    • ...When I call phone support for something, I get a minimum-wage drone who has absolutely no knowledge of the technology. All they have is a script. They make me do this and that thing because it's on the script, and it's usually a waste of time, because of course I've already done the easy things to fix it. Has the person on the support line at the ISP ever actually interacted with the web interface for this device they sent me? Of course not. The ISP just hands them the script.

      Are we to blame the ignorant inexperienced minimum-wage drone who was sold a job with a script, or are we going to blame corporate greed for being that fucking cheap?

      Either way, users are turning into the same idiots on the other end of the "support" line. De-volution continues.

    • by k6mfw ( 1182893 )

      Reminds me someone who tracks RFI spots in neighborhoods, a part-time job chasing down areas of excessive interference. From a post on QRZ.com couple years ago, he wrote the biggest culprits are highpower grow lights. He would identify a house which is radiating a lot of RFI with a signature typical from cheap grow lights and leave a notice on the door their place their place is emitting excessive RFI beyond FCC regulations.

      I emailed him asking isn't that risky approaching a house that is growing a lot of

  • Not so uncommon (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Confused ( 34234 ) on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @03:45AM (#60534768) Homepage

    To kill the access for a whole village is impressive, but I've witnessed similar cases with old appliances in apartment housing. Usually the easiest solution for the telco / cable company is to nicely gift the - usually elderly - resident with a nice middle of the price-range new tv. Makes the problem go away and the old lady is happy too.

    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      They should give the free TVs instead. :P I will keep using my CRT TVs. :P

  • Best guess (Score:5, Insightful)

    by richi ( 74551 ) on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @04:48AM (#60534908) Homepage
    As noted elsewhere, this is VDSL2 (fibre-backed DSL over regular UTP copper). My best guess is a fault in the TV was causing harmonics of the scan line frequency to interfere with the DSL bins (SD line is 15.625 kHz in Europe -- 25x625). She probably lives next to the roadside cabinet containing the VDSL2 DSLAM, hence the widespread disruption.
  • ADSL was in the UK 20 years ago, and there were more “old” style tvs back then. Surely they would of noticed a problem when such tvs were in common use.
    • by Alcari ( 1017246 )
      There likely were TONS of problems. Kinda like how there always issues with new network connections getting plugged in incorrectly.
      The difference is that 30 years ago, this was common, so it didn't make the news. Nowadays, having a CRT TV interrupt the network for 400 people is pretty unique, so it makes the news.
    • by PPH ( 736903 )

      Because it was common to fix loose connections in old vacuum tube TVs by smacking them on the top or side.

      Our society has lost the knowledge handed down by our ancestors.

  • They must also have the best people.

    • I'm sure they have, but clearly it took year and a half of getting nowhere before the problem got escalated enough that someone signed off on spending actual engineering hours on it. Normal technicians wouldn't be able to diagnose or solve this problem, because they simply wouldnt have a spectrum analyzer in their toolkit nor would they know what to do with one.
  • Curtis Mathis? That's my guess
  • by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @07:05AM (#60535112) Journal

    Back in the 90s, when my grandfather and I were more active on amateur radio, we'd have a conversation most days on 2m while I was heading home from work. We began to notice some interference on a pretty regular basis. It would slowly change frequency each evening and sweep across the frequency we were using it. So my grandfather began to follow the signal over time, and using his beam, determined the heading towards the source.

    It appeared to be coming from a small residential street up the side of a mountain. So I drove over and as I got closer I could easily pick up the interference on a handheld with a small antenna. Finally when I was at the specific house, I could remove the antenna entirely and still pick up the interference. It turned out to be an on-antenna TV amplifier - one of those where the amplifier is up on the roof at the antenna, and is powered through the coax. It had gone bad and, since it was connected to a large directional antenna, the emissions were broadcast out quite efficiently. The reason the frequency changed over time was that it was affected by the outside temperature, and in the evening when it cooled the frequency would change.

    Fortunately, the homeowner was understanding, and they even mentioned that their TV reception had gotten much worse months back. When they unplugged the amplifier the interference totally stopped.

    Another common culprit are the transformers that power doorbells. They can emit some nasty stuff when they fail.

    Moral is, most anything electronic can emit bad RF when something goes wrong. Things like older televisions that are attached to big antennas up on top of the house have the added issue of having a really big, efficient RF emitter attached, vastly increasing their ability to interfere with other devices.

    • IMO the moral is that as our society relies on ever-more-high-tech gadgets, and simultaneously becomes less and less proficient with fundamental technical comprehension (to say nothing of basic problem solving skills) we're going to be well and truly fucked.

      Welcome to idiocracy.

  • Dealing with electrical noise was a major part of it. Several instances of debugging with an oscilloscope and finding 60Hz sine waves on TTL control lines.

  • by kaizendojo ( 956951 ) on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @08:41AM (#60535388)
    I was working as the IT director at a private school with a buddy of mine. We had an issue where every morning, a segment of the network would go down and we couldn't figure out what was going on. After finally tracing it to a distant switch, we ran diagnostics on it (remotely) and found nothing inherently wrong with it but we were able to trace the outages and saw that they were frequently and almost regularly happening within a few minutes plus or minus 7:30 AM. So we decided to come in before that and take a look at the switch in person. The switch was located in an 'attic space' that was being used for the theatre department and when we got there we saw that they had moved the switch and sat it on top of a mini fridge with the cabling draped over the back. You can probably imagine what the cause was as well as we did. When the theater department director would arrive in the morning, first thing he did was make a cup of coffee. Then he'd open the fridge to grab some cream, leaving the fridge door open... as soon as the compressor would turn on, it injected just the right amount of EM interference to screw with the switch. Needless to say, we relocated the switch, moved the fridge to the other side of the room and warned the staff not to relocate equipment without consulting us first.
    • by lengel ( 519399 )

      But the compressor only came on once a day? I would expect network outages throughout the day if it were only caused by it cycling on.

  • A more complete/informative article. Son says TV was new. Villagers say problems persist. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ne... [telegraph.co.uk]

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