Ancient telly borked broadband for entire Welsh village Turning off an old second-hand television has restored internet services to a village in Wales. UK network provider Openreach explained that idyllic Aberhosan, which lies just south of Snowdonia National Park, would routinely lose internet services at 0700. Openreach engineers replaced cables in the hamlet, to no avail, then …
Depends on the problem. I shared a flat with some other students back when I was in college and we had an old CRT TV in the living room.
Occasionally the image would flatten to a single bright line in the middle. Tried cleaning the variable resistors to no avail.
Then I brought in an old-fashioned wooden mallet that I had made in shop class in secondary school. Worked like a charm - we'd just whack the top of the cabinet with it. We kept it on top of the TV, next to the (acoustic!) remote control.
Oh, those were the days!
The old dry solder joint. Or for older stuff, a valve needs reseating in a socket.
Or the scan coil round the neck of the tube, where it connects to the vertical scan with a push on connector, the contact surface oxidises.
In the old days we fixed tellies with tools. Then it became sub assembly swap, now it’s complete unit swap.
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It sounds like the complaints were ignored for a year and a half ... so the "NEWS" is that we found the problem now, not that they were ignored that long. It would be interesting to investigate why it took so long to send an engineer out.
Had El Reg talked about the weird Welsh village problems I expect that we'd have seen pages and pages of people saying the the problem was RFI caused by someone getting up in the morning and doing the same old thing every day (the icon is a joke).
I don't know how it works in the UK (this problem is a clue, I guess) but in the US you have to get all commercial kit tested and certified to prove that it doesn't emit RFI and that external RFI will not affect it. Everything that I design has inductors and filters in all external connections, even the power supply leads and ground connections so that nothing can get out, and nothing can get in. Every design is tested with massive amounts of external RFI applied and has to pass before it gets out there.
" in the US you have to get all commercial kit tested and certified to prove that it doesn't emit RFI and that external RFI will not affect it"
All new kit has to be 'CE' marked , it sounds like this pre-dates this.
There's a lot of crap comes in from China with the CE symbol (you'll have seen it on power supplies etc) that I'm sure has never been near a testing lab.
Still, why they didn't do a spectrum scan as part of initial and basic fault diagnosis is anyone's guess.
Simple - because they're clueless. It took them three years to identify a joint that became waterlogged in wet weather in Lincolnshire. They cited the "Electricity At Work Act" and said that "with the voltages involved, it wasn't safe to work in the rain".!!! In the end, I located the faulty joint for them, with a 30 second application of a Time Domain Reflectometer. The next time it wasn't raining, they opened the pit I'd identified, and re-jointed the cable. The whole village then got >20Mbs instead of the 50kbs they'd been getting on sunny days!
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I was thinking along the same lines.... They could have asked some of the local amateur radio operators and I'm sure they would have loved the challenge.
There was a story not too long ago about someone's home brew wireless doorbell system knocking out vehicle key fobs. The community sicced the local amateur radio operators on the culprit.
No, it sounds like Openreach spent 18 months doing everything they could think of, including replacing all the existing cabling in the village. Hardly ignoring things, in fact quite an expensive way of ignoring things.
Now, if they could just replace all the rusty old barbed wire fencing that is used to transmit the phone signal in some rural areas with Fibre, then we'd all be happy.
Having said that, I got FTTP in rural Ceredigion a couple of years ago, and I see that I can now upgrade to the 900Mbps service for an extra £10/month on top of my what I'm paying for 300Mbps (which is £50). It's very uneven provision!
upgrade to the 900Mbps service for an extra £10/month on top of my what I'm paying for 300Mbps (which is £50)
What is the use case that fills your 300Mbps pipe[*], and why would you want to pay £10/month more for a nominally fatter pipe that is not likely to improve your experience? Genuine question.
[Aside: I guess I am lucky to live elsewhere. I have 200Mbps FTTP for the equivalent of <£16/month and I keep refusing to pay ~£2.25/month more for 1Gbps because I can't see how it will improve my experience.]
[*] My rule of thumb says that with H264 one needs 25Mbps for 4K video streaming, so if your household streams 4 different 4K movies simultaneously (from different sources?) you might need 100Mbps. This seems to be a rather extreme case, frankly. With H265 you'll need 15Mbps per 4K stream.
He might need it because most services are still ridiculously asymmetrical.
Take Virgin (please). I got mildly excited when they started laying cables around the periphery of my home town but as soon as you burrow deep into the Ts&Cs to find the actual bandwidth promised, it may be 300Mbps downsteam but upstream it's a niggardly 20Mbps. All for a not-so-niggardly £50+ / month.
All moot since they gave up digging up pavements and roads before they got to my house...
Exactly. How crappy is OpenReach's equipment, anyway? It would seem it's about as bad as their front line field engineers ... 18 MONTHS to resolve this? Really? Wow!
And please note it's not actually resolved. One person agreeing not to turn on their legally owned & operated telly doesn't fix the core issue, no matter how hard you squint at it.
That TV is not legally operated!!! From what it sounds like it is in clear breach of the law as it is generating serious RFI. This would be the same story if it were knocking out air traffic control communications or something similar. I am surprised that the communications regulator haven't confiscated the set for destruction.
Not legally operated, but I suspect that until he is told about it, and unless he has modified it in some way (removing shielding) then the defense that it was legally bought and operated for n years would lead to him not being charged (negatively or positively Ba Boom Tish)
I wasn't implying that the owner of said TV was deliberately doing this - but certainly the law is very clear. However as someone else commented BT could have just bought them a new TV and taken the old one away for destruction just to make sure there is closure. After all if this person still is in possession of the set then they could theoretically turn it on if they wanted.
Yes, the cheapest short term fix would have been monitor then just replace the old TV. Long term consequences would be "My broadband is iffy, give me a new telly" as opening line for complaints.
Decades ago, for a problem like this, a chap1 from the nearest Post Office research station would have been dispatched and identified the issue2 within weeks of the problem being reported3.
1 not too senior, maybe also a PFY bag carrier.
2 just in case it was something new & worth looking at with possible practical value.
3 Installing a new line to Mr. Dai Public in the valleys otoh may have taken 18 months to organize.
Finding any OpenReach technician up a telegraph pole is an increasingly rare event.
OpenReach's in-the-field types are not permitted to climb a large majority of the installed poles for a variety of reasons, ranging from the poles being too old to be trusted with human weight, to having single phase (or very, very occasionally, 3-phase) power distribution cables attached, which is quite common in more rural East Anglia.
In once case a neighbour had an issue with their line. The OR engineer who attended (With all the 'working at height' PPE available) was forbidden to walk on my neighbours flat roof to reach the fault, presumably to avoid any liability for damage.
Having established the guy had been 'Clerk Of Works' in the past, the solution was for me to do the job 'Under Instruction' - me on the roof with my tools, him supervising from the top of the ladder. I still had to talk quite fast to get him to agree to this*, but common sense prevailed. The clincher was me saying "We agree the fault is 10ft away; it due to a fallen tree branch; you are not permitted to fix it; neither am I as is it is a wiring fault in BT** property since the fault it is on the network side of the NTE/Demarc. You are not permitted to work in the area by your employer, however I'm prepared to do the job under your supervision and assume the risk myself. My neighbour - your customer - is happy for me to do so."
Only thing I was pissed off about is that I had to use my jelly-crimps as he couldn't even pass me any from his van.
*There is little, if anything, that you can teach me about the characteristics of the UK PSTN's DEL or other 2,3 or 4 Wire line, with out without xDSL on the top :-) That said 'Every day is a school day' :-).
** Before the split that officially divorced BT and OpenReach
I know of a similar case
I used to work at a radio telescope that was plagued by interference from a part of the band that was protected.
We sent a team out with antenna and spectrum analyser in a van to triangulate and found the house that was giving the problem. It was an old TV antenna booster amp that was oscillating. We bough them a new TV that did not need it and disposed of the offending article.They were happy with the better reception.
If it amplifies it can oscillate.
BTW it did not take 18 onths
If the guy with the TV from hell is not charged, he should consider himself lucky.
Years ago there was a (very) old lady using a wireless phone. While it worked perfectly it had developed a fault causing *massive* interference. Obviously she was completely unaware of this. She was charged a grand and actually had to pay.
We moved next door to an older couple, who were very nice at first. Then the old lady was made to retire from her job at the local school, and became very bitter. One day she complained (amongst other things) that we were causing interference to her television with our CB radio. We told her that we didn't have a CB radio, but that didn't make any difference. To punish us, she tuned a radio to a quiet station and placed it with the loudspeaker against the party wall with the volume turned up to 11, so that every ten minutes, we were subjected to a ten second roar of interference. One day her granddaughter remarked "What's that awful noise in your front room?" Her reply was "I have to put up with that 24 hours a day". My brother in law, an electronics engineer, brought a Radio Direction Finder round and plotted where the signal was coming from. It appeared to be coming from halfway along the wall in their front hall, so I informed her husband and son, but she didn't believe them, and continued to rant at us. One day, we received a visit from an inspector from the Environment Agency, apparently she had made an official complaint, and they had sent him round to remonstrate with us. He was very surprised to be cordially invited into our house and offered a cup of tea. I explained what was going on, and where the interference was being generated, and I demonstrated that, even with our incomer main switch switched off, and the house electrically dead, we were still getting the roaring noise every ten minutes, so it couldn't have been generated by anything we were doing. He went round and told her that she was breaking the law by having the radio so positioned, and made her disconnect it and remove it from the wall. He then told her that it was her thermostat that was the culprit, and he then left. We then heard her say in a very loud voice "You may have been able to pull the wool over his eyes, but you can't fool me". Some while later, while she was in town, her son surreptitiously replaced the thermostat with a new one, and the interference ceased. Her comment was "Thank goodness you've stopped using that %*&^%$ CB radio".
I had a similar problem with a neighbour back in the 1950s. We had a neighbour whose TV was against the party wall, and because of his partial deafness, he invariably turned it up beyond 11 during the evening. No amount of imprecations from my Father or Mother would persuade him to move the set away from the party wall, so my Dad and his friend built TIT1 - Television Interrupting Tackle Version I. This was an RF oscillator that worked at (roughly) the same frequency as the local BBC Band 1 transmitter, and would beat with it, causing patterning on the picture and occasional loss of sound as the frequency of the valved oscillator drifted about. The apparatus was installed in a cupboard in my bedroom, in quite close proximity to next-door's TV aerial. Experiments had shown that the range of the thing was around 30 feet, so the other neighbours were unaffected.
ITV then started, with their Band III signal, necessitating the construction of TIT2, which was a valved multivibrator that produced harmonics throughout Bands I and III! It had similar range to the first version, and was installed in the same cupboard. The havoc this wrought to next door's TV reception was amazing. As the volume of the TV was increased during the evening, the equipment was switched on, and the TV next door would be switched off after a few minutes!
The neighbour complained to the GPO (responsible for interference problems in those days), and the visiting engineer suppressed the motors in my train set! He also had the sense to suggest to the neighbour that his TV would work better with his set-top aerial if it was relocated to the bay window, some distance from the party wall!!
"That TV is not legally operated!!! From what it sounds like it is in clear breach of the law as it is generating serious RFI. "
Don't be a muppet. RFI limits were far more generous in the past and barely even existed back when valve TV sets were common so by law it has grandfather rights and is perfectly legal. Sounds like corners were cut on the openreach kit and they've only just found out.
Let me guess - you think classic cars are illegal too because they don't have catalysts and particulate filters?
I call BS on you!!! At least until more sensible sounding arguments are presented :-) While name calling in the first 4 words of your response don't really get you off to a good start I do give you kudos for using a slang word that's very British (in that context) and that I don't hear any more since I moved many years ago to Ireland from the England ;-)
I would comment that if this TV is as old as the hills then it's been in use for that long. The DSL system has presumably been there for a good few years also. Hence the TV has gone faulty and probably lost all grandfather rights it might have had. I mean by your argument you could take any piece of old kit, repurpose it and then claim grandfather rights.
One thing you can be sure of is that if it was disrupting an air traffic control tower the set would be taken without any delay.
>If that's all it takes to knock out broadband in the UK it should be possible to make a powerful unit, fit it to a van
My first thought - easily possible to run off any engine ad inf so no need for a conspicuous van - wardriving proper.
A nice bit of 'how awesome are we PR' - though at 18-months I'm not sure - has just handed someone an excellent presentation for next year's DefCon which will now keep on giving.
I have to admit that I find it difficult to believe that BT's broadband infrastructure to be knocked out by a burst of RF interference. I know that the overground wires are probably poorly or even unshielded, so act as an aerial , but RFI transmission field strength is proportional to the inverse-square of the distance.
Unless the whole village's infrastructure goes through a pinch point just outside of the house, it should not be enough to disrupt ADSL (I suppose that if there was a microwave point to point link, this could be more easily disrupted, but there is not one mentioned).
If they were talking about the WiFi being used to distribute the service around individual houses, then I might believe that could be easily disrupted,
i thought this too, broadband and wifi seem to be interchangeable these days. Hardly a day goes by without someone posting on my village's FB page "is anyone else having problems with (vendor xyz's) wifi, meaning is anyone else having problems with (vendor xyz's) broadband connection.
RFI transmission field strength is proportional to the inverse-square of the distance
Only for a point source. One of the takeaways from my college physics class many years ago. A (infinite, but who's counting?) line source falls proportional to distance. A plane source doesn't fall off at all. In this case, if the RF is going out via a wire (mains, cable, telephone), it's a line source until it gets stopped by something (transformer, filter, whatever). Hard to direction find on, too.
I take your point about this not necessarily being a point source, but I believe that old televisions have transformers and inductors pretty much all over the place, so I suspect that it would be unlikely to be on the power side of things. I suppose it could be on the input side of the aerial of the TV, with a back transmission from the tuner, but this would be unlikely as if it is a really old TV, it would have to have a set-top box for DVB Freeview (no analogue TV transmission any more), so I would be surprise if the TV was still directly connected to the antenna.
If the TV was poorly earthed, then I suppose that the chassis could be acting as a transmitter, but not like an infinite plane.
So I would suspect that it would approximate a point source, at least once you get a distance away from it.
Yes. I find the entire explanation extremely far-fetched. Even if the telly emitted enough RF in a single short burst to disrupt a signal in a pair of copper wires on the other side of the village (which I should think would require MWs of power), surely the link would re-sync within a second or so, and normal TCP/IP error correction would mean that most people would not even notice the disruption.
"
If they were talking about the WiFi being used to distribute the service around individual houses, then I might believe that could be easily disrupted,
"
Even then, the strength of harmonics in any ancient TV that extend up above 2GHz are unlikely to be strong enough to interfere with anything more than a short distance away - and even if they are, the article states it was a brief powerup burst, which a WiFi system will tolerate with the user unlikely to notice. (Even if streaming a movie, the buffer should bridge a disruption of a second or two).
I used to knock around with a bunch of TV repair guys in the 1980s and they used to talk about chopper power supplies which put all sorts of junk back down the mains and the electricity companies hated them but there was no legislation to prevent this at the time. I would imagine this was the source of the problem as the burst of interference would have happened at a frequency of 50 or 100Hz, often enough to prevent any re-synch of the broadband connection.
I would agree, particularly as it seems the disconnections were happening on a regular pattern.
If something happens at the same time every day cables are not going to be the primary source of the problem although they may contribute.
Years ago we had a similar problem with a customer, strangely as soon as we put a monitor on the mains supply the problem went away. We never did find which piece of equipment, after several months of complaints, he realised was causing the problem.
Up here in rural Northern California it's almost always a bad capacitor on a well pump causing the issue. I don't know how many I've replaced for friends & family over the years after $TELCO couldn't figure out why POTS/ISDN/DSL kept crapping out at odd times ... Probably on the order of four or five dozen.
I had a girlfriend who lived near Grass Valley, she had zero problems with the well pump but she and her two neighbours had recurring problems that turned out to be the huge pool pump motor at the house across the road.
We messed around testing everything until we noticed the problem started and stopped with the water flow in the pool.
The pool wasn't that big but on a filtration cycle you vould damn near surf on it.
Well I'd guess this can't be a very common problem otherwise it would probably happen far more frequently and every engineer would be trained to look for this first. In every diagnostic field you always get that problem that crops up once every 10 years do you test for it every time, or do you attempt the fixes that work the other 9,999 times out of 10,000 ?
If anything makes the case for Fibre this is probably it. I wonder if they spent more on the investigation and engineers than they would have putting fibre in. I do think it's unfair to blame the TVs owner for what is essentially an invisible problem. It'd have been nice to know that BT in the relief they didn't have to spend any more trying to fix the problem, had just bought them a new TV rather than them feeling mortified and embarrassed (according to the BBC article).
around here all the fttc connections fall over with the first flash within 5 miles from a thunderstorm.
it then takes 4 minutes with no further strikes to reconnect.
since a decent storm could take us offline for hours at a time we added a 4g dongle to the router as a failover, now we only notice if the fttc connection is down by the increased speed of the 4g connection.
Spelt!
What's low gluten flower got to do with this discussion? I suppose that does go in one's bellie, if eaten while watching tellie and wearing one wellie...
I've just looked it up though, to confirm what I suspected. I've never liked the sound of spelt - although I'm fine with dealt - I prefer the sound of spelled. As with so many Americanisms - spelled is actually perfectly valid in english. Similarly if you look in your OED you'll find that specialised and specialized are both correct. The same being true for spelled and spelt.
As with so many of these things, english changed in the intervening years in ways that just didn't catch on in the USA. But the US usage was often standard back in Shakespeare's time. Some of this is just the natural evolution of language, and some of it is the Victorians creating rules, either in order to try to make the language conform to rules (fat chance!) - or so they could have people to look down on. The split infinitive is an example of one of these Victorian inventions, that is mostly best ignored.
Terribly sorry - I really should have been clearer and justified absolutely every word in that sentence. I also used that google search thing just in case I'd missed something over lockdown and things had changed. The world does not end with my friends, you are right there, which is why I checked. If only everyone checked everything they did and then corrected it the world would be a lovely place with no need for smarmy comments.
After an extensive internet search on the word tellie I got the following.
tellie
Tellie...a constantly evolving and ever changing group of friends that know the true meaning of love...
and
tellie
a tellie is the most amazing couple you can find they always have something to talk about and always have inside jokes like a rusty sippy cup but, overall they would be the couple to get married when they are older. they are also a weird couple to handle cause they have their goofy moments at times but they have great bonding skills
and also
https://www.tellie.tv/
Then I got bored
as our main set but it's only 15 years old, fits nicely into where we want it and it still works fine. As devices no longer have SCART outputs we may need to change at some point but it seems that anything with a good picture and sound is going to be huge (comparatively). Ours is 28" and that's OK, good speakers too.
Really can't see point in changing stuff unless really need to - dishwasher and gas oven are both 15 years old and work fine (I can't use induction stove), washing machine is 22 years old. (It's a great way to get rid of the appliance cover sales folk with great offers to cover appliances - tell them how old your stuff is they go away).
>dishwasher and gas oven are both 15 years old and work fine (I can't use induction stove), washing machine is 22 years old. (It's a great way to get rid of the appliance cover sales folk with great offers to cover appliances - tell them how old your stuff is they go away).
Back in May my wife put our white goods on 1 year appliance cover - all 17+ years old...
Today I've taken delivery of a new dishwasher, last week it was the tumble drier... So far £800+ of white goods for a £200 outlay. Only downside is that I don't expect the replacements to last as long as the originals as neither have a 10 year manufacturers guarantee.
FYI, many of the appliance cover sales calls are scammers, from the few I've spoken to, I suspect the major (legit) appliance cover providers have suffered data leaks...
"FYI, many of the appliance cover sales calls are scammers, from the few I've spoken to, I suspect the major (legit) appliance cover providers have suffered data leaks..."
They have. Or the chancers are getting better. When they call me, if they have the correct make of whatever, I always tell them I don't have that whatever any more and the new one is $some_other_make. Within a few weeks I'll get a call about my $some_other_make whatever. Then I rinse and repeat. Strangely, I've not had any of those calls for over a year now!
trouble is you'll probably find the washing machine uses about half a swimming pool of water and takes another reactor to be turned on at sellafield to provide the electric for you to wash 2 pairs of sockets and a pair of trollies! We have a new miele dishwasher and it washes a full load of dishes fantastically well all on 6l of water and 1.5kw of go juice!
At existing rates, it would take me approximately 20 years to save the cost of the new dishwasher in water and leccy. The new machine won't last twenty years. In fact, I'd be astonished if it made it eight. My old one will still be in operation forty years from now. Do the math,
you're missing out, we bought an induction hob when we move in to our renovated house 9 years ago. I was only saying to the misses last week that it looks the same as it did when we bought it it still looks brand new! They are soooooo easy to clean, safe (we have 4 cats and our daughter is now 8) as they don't get hot to the touch, and it is very economical. With prices pretty low these day its a no brainer, probably the best thing we've bought!
>Help save the planet by getting a new one that probably uses half the energy, water, etc
Energy efficiency/Green appliances aren't necessarily all they are cracked up to be and appropriate in all circumstances.
For example,
My 2002 tumble dryer manufacturer's specification gives an energy consumption of 4.37kWh and a programme time of 90mins (6kg cotton/linen, store dry)
Its 2019 (curent model) replcement gives a figure of 4.21kWh and 121mins for the same program.
The figures for the heat pump equivalent to the 2019 model are 2.29kWh and 174mins
Whilst the heat pump version uses less energy the 2002 model can complete twice the number of loads in the same elapse time - something that is important to consider when you are doing the weekly family wash which can be 4~6 loads, being done back-to-back.
If I look at the long-term reliability and maintainability then the heat pump is the worst of the lot; there is not only more to go wrong, but if something does go wrong it is more likely to be expensive - involving both a trained engineer and more of their time.
FYI, the 2002 tumble dryer was written off because a circa £85 heater (user installable) was no longer available from the parts providers used by the insurer. I suggest given the above information, the most environmentally-friendly solution was the replacement of a single part on the 2002 dryer...
>Help save the planet by getting a new one that probably uses half the energy, water, etc
Part 2.
Comparing the 2004 dishwasher with the 2019/2020 variant, provides even less comfort. Here there is no real difference between them on the Eco and Quick settings, the differences are in the Intensive programme, where the new model uses 15 ltrs of water, 1,500kWh and runs for 3:30 (hh:mm), whereas the old model 20 ltrs, 1,600kWh and 1:52 (hh:mm).
In this case the old one failed due to a water leak on to an IC which is no longer available. So once again complete new machine needed to fix a single failed component.
Yes, I know I'm comparing machines that originally came with a 10 year manufacturers warranty with new ones with 2 year warranty's, but as you can see the energy and water efficiency advances haven't been as much as we are being led to believe and they come with the cost of significantly longer programmes.
Assuming that this TV is emitting some spurious radiation then I assume it predates EMC testing. If that is the case then it would not be a digital TV, although it could have an external converter. Even if the TV is the real cause then just how close was this TV to the BT cables? As the inverse square law drops the signal level by the square of the distance then the cable must has been very, very close to have this affect.
Alternatively, the BT equipment is not EMC compliant in regard to susceptibility. If that is the case then almost any equipment in that village will knock the system out. Which leads me to my final comment; why didn't the equipment recover after each 7am spike?
I remember when Openreach had a REIN team who I'm pretty sure were based in Swansea. Don't know if they still exist but there is definitely a process for engineers to submit a REIN case.
REIN, SHINE and PEIN are, while not exactly common, something that every SFI engineer should be aware of and as such I don't understand why this took so long.
I remember a case only a couple of years ago where the third engineer to be booked for a job didn't even bother to get out of his van outside the customer premises. From the notes of the first two engineers he suspected the cause to be electrical impulse noise so the first thig he did on arrival was tune his van radio to 612KHz (any experienced engineer knows that particular trick) and said he could hear the interference so strongly that there was no point him even leaving his van.
Where it all went wrong there was that a case was raised to the REIN team who brought down their clever analyzers and found the building from which the offending electromagnetic forces eminated which is all good, but the occupants of said building refused them access. In law unfortunately the engineers have absolutely no enforcement powers. Numerous letters from Openreach had no effect.
Unfortunately the government decided at some point that it would be a sensible idea to put the BBC in charge of enforcing cases of radio frequency interference. There are two problems here. Firstly the BBC has few teeth to enforce such things. Secondly the BBC really don't care if something is interfering with broadband services they only care if it is interfering with radio or television reception. The upshot being that the BBC have no will to use the few teeth that they have.
Maybe a couple of decades ago. These days they don't give a monkey's. People calling from easily identifiable UK companies despite the TPS list?... they don't care. BT themselves supplying 'wifi extender plugs' that can wipe out shortwave for hundreds of yards... they won't do bugger all :(
"Unfortunately the government decided at some point that it would be a sensible idea to put the BBC in charge of enforcing cases of radio frequency interference."
I didn't know that! Last I knew (wireless telegraphy act from decades ago) they had virtually unlimited rights of entry but would usually call the cops before they broke the door down, mainly to protect themselves from irate owners. They didn't need a warrant in those days.
Pretty sure RFI outside of BBC broadcast bands is enforced by Ofcom.
Circa 2012, while working in a small the central London office with poor mobile signal, had a visit from Ofcom bods following interference reports from network operators. Turned out a sales type had plugged in a dodgy mobile signal booster, though I think any improvement to his signal was a placebo effect. Ofcom bods were happy to take it away instead of taking legal action.
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not REIN but atmospherics. Back in the mid 90's i worked in a ship yard in Falmouth. Summer 95 was lovely, hot, sunny, no wind, flat calm seas. Trouble was these conditions were just right for telly's in Falmouth to pick up bloody French TV from the North coast of France, trying to watch telly you had this bloody ghosting of French TV in the background!
Some guy's homebrew IoT security system took out all of his neighbor's key fobs and garage door openers in a several-block radius.
From the linked article: The cause was a custom, man-made device inside a resident’s home
I'd have been inclined to word it as, perhaps, "a custom device built by an electronics enthusiast" or something... Or does Cleveland suffer from devices built by, oh I dunno, extra-terrestrial waterfowl?
DSL is shit.
If OFCOM forced BT and other providers to install real FTTH, this ridiculous nonsense wouldn't occur.
And double indictment for taking 18-months to get an engineer out there with spectrum monitoring equipment. (The cable replacement program should have been Fiber all the way to the home. OFCOM suffers regulatory capture, just like the US FCC.)
Oh my goodness. Somehow why am I not supprized, and why… because the exact same thing happened in my street. Not in a sparse Welsh hamlet but in a dense town near Reading.
How can it take so long to find it out when an AM radio (or perhaps something a little more sensitive and directional) can track it down and maybe a spectrum analyser on the phone line etc.
The internet would go off at 8am and come back at 10pm. Oh and DAB radio and… It impacted the whole street but when you speak to BT/OpenReach they don’t share that so you don’t know that the guy at the end of the street who is an IT professional working from home is now working nights!
In the end, and I mean, in the end, they finally sent out someone who did not just want to change the master socket and with the right kit and I got a phone call which went something like (him) “I’m not coming today” (me) “what! I’ve taken the morning off work!” (him) “I think I’ve finally tracked it down, will you run some tests for me”. Long story short he had found the old lady who’s equally old CRT TV had failed which she switched on at 8am and… turned off at 10pm. I guess the line flyback transformer was breaking down or something. He asked her to switch it off for the test and the internet came back. Apparently she said “OK but only for a minute, I’m not missing Deal Or No Deal.”.
A few minutes later I met the engineer and also the IT professional followed by the old lady. At least some sanity regarding us not being made aware of each other prevailed and myself and the IT pro said we would buy her a new TV as she did not really have the means.
They took the old TV for analysis and said they would bring it back when finished. We respectfully told them to please *%$^(: drop it out of the 8th floor window instead.
The fact Openreach SHITE noise all over the HF Spectrum nationally from poorly configured VDSL services deserved more coverage. OFCOM can't see what harm it does despite HF spectrum users investing significant dosh in equipment that don't work no more. Bloody shambles.
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