News: 1600761426

Turning off an old second-hand television has restored internet services to a village in Wales.

I can't see any mention of it being second-hand, just old.

BBC article covering same story also says second-hand.

Quick clout on the top used to fix most problems with old CRTs.

Thumping on the side with a screwdriver is the canonical method.

'clout' Now there's a word you don't hear much of these days...

This is the correct procedure though, always worked in my day.

Clout is a term we talk about a fair bit but I've not yet tried : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clout_archery

It may my Yorkshire origins, but if anyone's device needs a gentle nudge, my catchphrase has always been:

"If in doubt, give it a clout"

openreach sharpened their device did they?

Wear it out, make it do or do without. As a fine old piece of equipment, I wonder if he was getting strong doses of x-ray each morning as well. Off to have more wine from grandma's pewter goblets. Waste not want not.

No doubt the plonk is decanted into those lovely crystal decanters first.

Well that would put lead in his pencil.

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).

that won't happen?

Actually, 18 months seems like an improvement in getting Openreach to take things seriously.

Still, why they didn't do a spectrum scan as part of initial and basic fault diagnosis is anyone's guess.

It takes time (money), because an awful lot of the UK cable installation is very old, new wires tend to fix a big enough % of issues anyway for the bean counters to set it as job #1.

They replaced the cables in the viollage. Hardly ignoring the problem

It says a lot for Openreach's equipment that it can neither tolerate nor recover from such interference... current equipment must work up to the specified RF field level (several volts per metre) *and* recover once the interference goes away...

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 chap 1 from the nearest Post Office research station would have been dispatched and identified the issue 2 within weeks of the problem being reported 3 .

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.

I joined the Post Office (trading as British Telecommunications) in 1981. Yes, it would have been a "chap" of the male gender.

Times haven't changed much, but I have seen a female technician up a telegraph pole at least once.

....wouldn't the cheapest short term fix have been to wrap it in tinfoil? Might have improved the quality of the programming as well.

When something similar happened in Hull, KCOM bought the owner a new TV and swapped it. I'm sure the owner was delighted, and the old TV is in the "Lighthouse" with other KCOM curiosities, as a discussion point for customers and visitors.

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.

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, and kill off large chunks of UK infrastructure in a fairly anonymous way.

>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 bet the TV owner is feeling pretty sheepish!

Baa! Just HAD to ram that joke home, didn't ewe?

No pulling the wool over your eyes...

Openreach engineer, Michael Jones -> Openreach engineer, Jones the Broadband.

Now where's my Sir Pterry icon? Oh well, this will do...

..cease and desist with the Trolling...

Surely checking for interference should have been done *before* spending loadsa money on replacing cables? Standard basic checking. Was this the kind of interference that can be detected by anyone using an AM radio?

... they don't teach kids the basics anymore.

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.

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).

that the Openreach kit should be able to cope, come REIN or SHINE. Apparently not.

Do have a

So what happens to the badly shielded equipment in a thunderstorm (or other EM pulse)???

What on earth is a tellie? No-one I know would spell itlike that.

News for you: the world doesn't end where you stop having acquaintances

No. He's right. It's telly. Spelled like Kelly.

> No-one I know would spell it like that.

You are wrong, JohnKellie

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).