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."
"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."
Embarrased? Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Embarrased? Why? (Score:5, Funny)
and this is why you don't have friends.
Re: Embarrased? Why? (Score:3)
Re: Embarrased? Why? (Score:3)
It's a village in rural Wales... surprised Openreach could even find it, let alone have installed any sort of broadband cabling already
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How do you propose applying shielding to what is likely almost-a-century-old unshielded twisted pair?
Re:Embarrased? Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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.
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Libertarian, eh?
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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.
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wtf? You take a random article written for non-techies as a reason to defund the BBC? The BBC just reported this sorry saga - which is their job - as did a number of other outlets, defund those other outlets as well!
Your comment was all about your prejudices and had nothing to do with the actual story.
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You're right; I shouldn't care when an organisation I pay for reports nonsense.
It wasn't nonsense.
The problem wasn't with the TV (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Umm, if you look inside a distribution cupboard you'll see the cables ARE shielded. Over to you genius...
Re:The problem wasn't with the TV (Score:4, Insightful)
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The armo[u]r seems to be fairly well wrapped around the cable without major gaps. What prevents grounding one end and using it for shielding?
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Oh dear, looks like you confused him with an obvious point.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
Call me old fashioned... (Score:5, Funny)
We don't try to diagnose problems anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:We don't try to diagnose problems anymore (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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.
Re:We don't try to diagnose problems anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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...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.
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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)
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.
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They should give the free TVs instead. :P I will keep using my CRT TVs. :P
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Considering that I had to deal with the local cable company upgrading a relatives 13 inch BW to a HDTV receiver when they did the "free" digital upgrade thats not outside the realm of possibility.
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In the UK a TV Licence is required for receiving television signals (or using BBC Iplayer) but is not required for simply owning a television.
No, its only required if the BBC goons say that you watch it. It has nothing to do with whether or not you actually watch it. All they have to do is say you do and you are legally on the hook with full legal punishments, and you cant get rid of the TV at this point either, because its too late you owe it now.
You are covering for this insane system right now. WHY ARE YOU COVERING FOR THIS INSANE SYSTEM RIGHT NOW?
Best guess (Score:5, Insightful)
Why wasn’t this a problem before? (Score:2)
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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.
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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.
18 months searching? (Score:2)
They must also have the best people.
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Let me guess (Score:2)
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Similar issue in the 90s (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
My first job was in industrial automation. (Score:2)
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.
Reminds me of an old story (Score:4, Interesting)
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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.
More information... (Score:2)
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Exactly what sort of network do you think one would hook an "old TV" up to? Maybe.... cable?
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Cable seems to be a rare thing in villages, not enough density of subscribers.
My point was that the article was written by a journalist and did not contain technical details (you know, "News for Nerds?")
PS: it wasn't radio/WiFi either, even if you might be led to think this is what radio interference from a TV set could "knock out".
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And since they transitioned from analog to digital in the UK some years ago, he would have required a digital receiver to watch the broadcast on such an old TV. This is an option that works almost anyywhere, because all you need is a TV, a digital receiver, and an appropriate antenna.
Alternatively there is digital satellite broadcasts, where you also only need a TV, a digital satellite receiver, and an appropriate antenna (dish and LNB for digital broadcast). This
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It doesn't say how old. An "Old TV" these days could be something with a built-in digital receiver. They've been around for at least 20 years now, so it's possible.
Taking out an entire villiage? Uh yeah...THAT is going to be from hardware that still clicks and hums when it turns on.
The only way any "modern" TV is going to do that, is if it's part of a botnet.
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Re:What "broadband"? Fiber? DSL? Wireless? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not sure where you got this idea from.
He probably gets it from the goons that go door to door, inspect your place, and then tell you what you owe them for your televisions.
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Obviously you made that up, but why did you bother?
I got the impression - reading the story from another source yesterday - that he had owned that TV for decades, since it worked he saw no reason to replace it. Now he does have a reason.
Re:What "broadband"? Fiber? DSL? Wireless? (Score:4, Informative)
When their goons still roamed the streets you could refuse entry to your house. But if you were stupid enough to let into your house (children needed to be taught not to let them in) a lot of them would behave like complete assholes devoid of any concept of privacy.
The dad of a friend of mine worked temporarily for the German GEZ when he was in need of a job. As one of the "goons" he was provided a little handbook that detailed how far they could push it while still staying within the legal limits. They were actively encouraged to be intrusive and pushy.
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It's a good thing he wasn't a Libertardian, if this happened in the US there's good chance he'd keep using the TV just to annoy everyone else because "no one can tell me what to do on my property."
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Obviously you made that up, but why did you bother?
This is exactly what happens in the UK and has been happening for over a fucking decade... and its been in stories on slashdot off and on... SO THERE IS NO WAY THAT YOU DO NOT KNOW THIS WITH YOUR UID
Stop being a lying fuck, Vlad.
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Don't be ridiculous, Virgin has a lot of cable customers in the UK. As others have posted, this is about OpenReach and therefore xDSL (or fiber, but TV doesn't mess with fiber).
Re:What "broadband"? Fiber? DSL? Wireless? (Score:4, Informative)
Still the article is a mess, but it leaves some clues.
For example they tried to fix the problem with a "cable replacement", which failed. That already suggests a DSL type connection over copper cables.
Furthermore in the article on BBC they write:
And if you start to look that technical term up you might be landing here: https://support.zen.co.uk/kb/K... [zen.co.uk]
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Not interfere with fiber itself, just cause enough interference to destabilize electrical devices that sit at the end of that fiber (home or the central location).
I fully agree that this is far less likely (you would need something closer to an EMP weapon) than the other possibilities (and the real one).
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If you look up Aberhosan on the map it's deep in rural Wales. They will be getting a few megabits via DSL over wet string out there, even at the best of times.
Looking at Street View it appears that most houses have satellite dishes too. Probably have to, when the switch was made to digital broadcasting they likely lost the poor terrestrial reception they had and switched to satellite.
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Simple: create a source that provides enough interference that the electronics at either end gets corrupted. Sure, one may find it hard to corrupt the optical signal in the fiber, but that signal needs to be transmitted and received by a box of electronics at either end. That box requires a power from the mains, which a nearby device could pollute. The box also needs to perform se
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First off, I want to see the technology that can interfere with fibre connections without physically tapping into the fibre.
Fiber is definitely preferred, but not immune to weirdness. It's very sensitive to bend radius, so it's much easier to screw up a junction box just by rustling around in there.
Last place I worked we had a WAN fiber that just kept going down... we'd send the techs out to look at it and by the time they got there it was working. Over and over. I managed to install a couple spare optical amplifiers+attenuators that would allow us to view the received dBm at a high resolution. Analysis of these charts showe
Re: What "broadband"? Fiber? DSL? Wireless? (Score:2)
Given it's a village in rural Wales, I'd guess at DSL - the Openreach site (they install much of the fibre for FTTC/P) doesn't seem to know what they have...
Re:What "broadband"? Fiber? DSL? Wireless? (Score:5, Informative)
DSL. Ignore the people saying 'cable'. No way would a rural village have cable, and if they did it wouldn't be maintained by Openreach because they are the telco provider. https://www.ispreview.co.uk/in... [ispreview.co.uk]
Re:What "broadband"? Fiber? DSL? Wireless? (Score:5, Informative)
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From another article ISPreview [ispreview.co.uk] it appears the village was using an ADSL/VDSL connection, not coax, and that interference is common with the old unshielded wires.
Since the wires are twisted pair (if done correctly), there should be next to no interference. Looks to me looks to me like the phone network installation was done shoddily. Also, 18 months to use a spectrum analyzer? The one time I had a technician at home to debug a problem of this type, that was the first thing he did.
Re:What "broadband"? Fiber? DSL? Wireless? (Score:4, Interesting)
CRT TVs had a degaussing coil that is briefly activated when you switch it on. UTP would not stand up to close proximity to that.
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CRT TVs had a degaussing coil that is briefly activated when you switch it on. UTP would not stand up to close proximity to that.
Well, possibly. But phone networks are star topology. So it would have to be UTP to UTP as well _and_ it would have to be "close proximity" initially.
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From the low res satellite image it looks like you can count the households using only both of your hands.
This article [mirror.co.uk] claims that the village is "400-strong". But the pictures look more like what googe maps suggested.
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Well, it still seems pretty likely that shoddy wiring is to blame in the end. Bundled phone wires are usually foil-shielded to prevent cross-talk on bends and the like. But you are right, if this is just a few lines, then somebody messing up one splicing point or very old cabling could take out the whole village.
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That could also explain why they already tried to rewire the entire thing, because that's relatively cheap if you don't have to tear up roads and can use just use poles instead. But it also showcases how vulnerable such a network can be to electromagnetic interference.
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Since the wires are twisted pair (if done correctly), there should be next to no interference.
No. That reduces interference and crosstalk between the wires. It doesn't prevent REIN and SHINE interference from generating current in the wires.
Also, 18 months to use a spectrum analyzer
Going to guess that was a wifi spectrum analyser. Not the same thing at all. Looking for SHINE sources needs more specialised equipment, tracking it directionally and looking over a large area. And being at the right place at the right time since sods law will be the TV is off for the 2 hours you're there.
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Since the wires are twisted pair (if done correctly), there should be next to no interference.
Or maybe most of them had a WiFi router and didn't try to plug directly into the modem?
Also, 18 months to use a spectrum analyzer?
Maybe they should have sent the infamous TV detector van.
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Also, 18 months to use a spectrum analyzer?
My guess is that it wasn't a persistent outage but rather everyone drops at 7 AM. The old TV used vacuum tubes or something so that only when it kicked on did it generate the pulse. That means you have less than a second to capture the source.
Re:What "broadband"? Fiber? DSL? Wireless? (Score:4, Informative)
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My aunt, who speaks English as a third language, pronounces it something like "brorwent". So that's what a lot of the world is actually getting when they're being sold "broadband", it's "brorwent".
Now I need to see how she pronounces "5G".
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My wife and her friends call a router a "mouse". Not sure what they call an actual computer mouse.
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Cable. Obviously.
I know nobody reads the articles, but did you even read the summary?
There's one kind of internet service a faulty TV is going to be able to interfere with. One.
Cable. Coax cable. Not DSL, not fiber, not wireless. Cable.
Wow. I've never seen someone so convincingly wrong.
Your ignorance, is practically impressive.
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Wow. I've never seen someone so convincingly wrong.
Your ignorance, is practically impressive.
I take it you don't know any Trump and/or Johnson supporters then?
Yes, I remember meeting a few of them here and there.
Unlike Biden.
Re:What "broadband"? Fiber? DSL? Wireless? (Score:5, Informative)
Cable. Obviously.
I know nobody reads the articles, but did you even read the summary?
There's one kind of internet service a faulty TV is going to be able to interfere with. One.
Cable. Coax cable. Not DSL, not fiber, not wireless. Cable.
WRONG. Here in the UK we are massively DSL transmitted by mostly above ground phone lines in the last leg to the property. DSL works on a frequency of around 2-3MHz and it can be knocked out by RF transmissions. I do amateur radio and on a certain frequency on the 80m amateur band, due to the unfortunate length of the phone line which made it a perfect antenna for that frequency when I transmitted I'd knock my broadband off.
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This is British Telecom (Openreach is just a brand) , most of their "engineers" could barely recognise a router if they saw one , never mind a spectrum analyser. Sadly the days of telecoms field engineers understanding electronics and related subjects are long gone, now they're like car mechanics - just keep swapping parts for new ones until it works again.
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Because BT is a once great company now in a race to the bottom, run by accountants and C-suites who only understand ledgers and hire the dumbest people they can find for the least money.
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You're describing nearly every company that has been around longer than 20-30 years.
You're being very generous with the 20-30 year time frame.
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