But how?
Here is a recent story on electrical interference causing internet outages in a Welsh village. The story is all over the press, but here it is from the ISP concerned.
Second-hand TV wipes out broadband for entire village
None of the stories have much technical detail, perhaps on purpose. Anyone know more about what equipment was affected and how the trouble was caused? Was this a wired or wireless broadband?
Can our audio equipment be zapped like this?
Here is a recent story on electrical interference causing internet outages in a Welsh village. The story is all over the press, but here it is from the ISP concerned.
Second-hand TV wipes out broadband for entire village
None of the stories have much technical detail, perhaps on purpose. Anyone know more about what equipment was affected and how the trouble was caused? Was this a wired or wireless broadband?
Can our audio equipment be zapped like this?
I have reservations about this story.
Sounds like Fake News to me, put out to increase readership or cause more social fears.
Like those (now stopped, thankfully) scam phone calls from idiots telling me my computer is sick and disrupting the whole internet.
Haven't we had enough of fake news stories?
Sounds like Fake News to me, put out to increase readership or cause more social fears.
Like those (now stopped, thankfully) scam phone calls from idiots telling me my computer is sick and disrupting the whole internet.
Haven't we had enough of fake news stories?
The linked article states the village has yet to receive fibre broadband so they have copper cabling. However the article is not specific as to whether the customer's wireless modems were affected or the network in the street.
Pano: Was reported on a couple of tech sites in the UK and a lot of discussion over this. A one off interference burst at 7AM hardly seems the end of the world as wifi should recover in seconds. Given any old AM radio would pick that up its a shame it took 18 months. But this is openreach, who have 18th century SLAs on a lot of their work.
On a Dutch forum someone speculated that the TV may have been oscillating and interfering if the TV signal and Internet were going via the same coax cables. It was a fairly modern television by the way, see Grandparents wiped out entire village'''s internet for 18 MONTHS by turning on PS30 TV to watch Piers Morgan on GMB .
Thanks for the video link. I had seen the Sun story, but not the video.
Bill, if there are any details from tech sites, I'd like to read them. I assume this SHINE wasn't a unique impulse at 7AM, but that it repeated as long as the tele was on. Or maybe not? Haven't seen details saying how long the network was down.
Bill, if there are any details from tech sites, I'd like to read them. I assume this SHINE wasn't a unique impulse at 7AM, but that it repeated as long as the tele was on. Or maybe not? Haven't seen details saying how long the network was down.
I got the impression that the TV must have had a blown mains filter capacitor and that the original owner had sold it cheap before it made there house stink again.
Street view shows overhead cabling for phones and power on the same wooden poles that also carry street lighting.
Broad band is going to be grotty at best with that arrangement.
A little bit of noise from an old telly was all it took to kill it.
Google Maps
Street view shows overhead cabling for phones and power on the same wooden poles that also carry street lighting.
Broad band is going to be grotty at best with that arrangement.
A little bit of noise from an old telly was all it took to kill it.
Google Maps
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Highly unlikely for the TV to radiate throughout the whole village.
I did a project for an electronic dog flap in the 1990's.
It sent out a pulse through a large coil that caused a LC on the dog collar to ring if it was close enough. The detection coil circuit worked a treat. That was until next door turned on their TV. The line oscillator radiated through the scan coils and out into my office !
Had to go for a RF solution in the end to avoid the problem.
Back in the late 70's I was part of a Motorola ham club hunt to figure out who was jamming our 2 meter ham repeater. Every weekday around 10 AM a signal would appear on the repeater's input frequency of 146.19 MHz causing the repeater to start transmitting. This usually lasted until 2 or 3 PM then returned at random times during the evening.
The ham guys chased this for weeks until they settled on a townhouse about a mile from the Motorola plant. A meeting with the homeowners confirmed that the culprit was an older tube type color tv set.....That's where I came in since I had worked in a TV repair shop during the tube years. For reasons unknown to me or anyone else the color burst oscillator was emitting a rather strong and stable signal on 146.19 MHz. A new tube fixed the problem.
During my career at Motorola I chased down several oddball interference issues including a cell tower that was wiping out police calls. A corroded connector was the nonlinear element that mixed two cell signals together to create IMD products that landed on the police dispatcher frequency.
That local broadband network has to get connected to the internet somehow. These connections are not always fiber, especially in older neighborhoods. A microwave link is is the medium of choice there. The "backhaul" link was likely where the interference took place since "the whole neighborhood" lost their internet.
The ham guys chased this for weeks until they settled on a townhouse about a mile from the Motorola plant. A meeting with the homeowners confirmed that the culprit was an older tube type color tv set.....That's where I came in since I had worked in a TV repair shop during the tube years. For reasons unknown to me or anyone else the color burst oscillator was emitting a rather strong and stable signal on 146.19 MHz. A new tube fixed the problem.
During my career at Motorola I chased down several oddball interference issues including a cell tower that was wiping out police calls. A corroded connector was the nonlinear element that mixed two cell signals together to create IMD products that landed on the police dispatcher frequency.
That local broadband network has to get connected to the internet somehow. These connections are not always fiber, especially in older neighborhoods. A microwave link is is the medium of choice there. The "backhaul" link was likely where the interference took place since "the whole neighborhood" lost their internet.
Ahhhh, thanks George. The microwave link had not occurred to me. That might do it.
Wonder if the details of this one will be published?
Wonder if the details of this one will be published?
The 'S' in 'SHINE' is single so the inference was a single pulse. Which makes it all the stranger. If I get some time over the weekend I'll try and streetview the village and see if there is any sign of microwave backhaul. Not something Openreach like to do unless absolutely necessary.
There is only a couple of phone lines on this pole but there are a fair number of feral loon aerials up there.
Google Maps
Google Maps
Yes, SHINE should refer to a single isolated event like an arcing power switch. It is possible that a reporter used the word incorrectly, or the event occurred infrequently enough for it to be called SHINE, but often enough to happen faster than the modem's restart sequence.
I kept hearing a "zoot" sound in some of my audio amps, and on an AM radio. It occurred randomly during the day, often in the morning, and repeated at intervals from a few seconds, to nearly a minute, long enough to be called "SHINE." I set out to find the source with a portable AM radio one morning, and it didn't take long. It was my neighbor's coffee pot. The old coffee maker used a bimetallic strip as a thermostat, that applied full power to the heating element until it got too hot, then it opened the circuit, creating a wicked arc in the process. This thing created a pretty strong SHINE inside their house which made AM radio reception impossible. It didn't bother me since I don't listen to AM radio, but they do. In all those years they never connected the coffee pot to the static.
Here its the crappy connections on the cable company's cable that cause periodic pixelation on the TV when the wind blows, but the modem drops out and it can take several minutes to reconnect. I lose phone and internet for however long it takes for the modem to reconnect. If there is a strong storm the dropouts come faster than the modem can reconnect, so my phone and internet can be off for hours. They can't seem to find the problem but never fail to send a $270 / month bill. The pole that has rotted in half at the ground and was hung in a tree by the county sheriff to get it out of the road would be a good place to start, but it has been hanging in a tree since early June.
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I see several vertically polarized Yagi antennas on the rooftops. Most are pointed toward a common location. I don't know how over the air TV signals are sent in the UK, but here and in most of North America they are all horizontally polarized. Here the 902 to 928 MHz ISM frequency band is used for wireless internet. Those antennas are sized for somewhere between 300 MHz and 1 GHz, it's hard to tell the exact size from the picture.
Good estimate.
Some areas are indeed vertically polarized.
UK TV is 470Mhz – 800Mhz, moving to 470Mhz – 700Mhz.
Some areas are indeed vertically polarized.
UK TV is 470Mhz – 800Mhz, moving to 470Mhz – 700Mhz.
You are right.
The village is in a valley and the TV is sent from a local transmitter. The vertical signal is less likely to interfere with the main transmitter at the edges of the area as it is horizontal.
The story is likely very true.
Finding issues like this was my job for the past 6 years or so. These issues are more easily explained when you look at the characteristics of a receiver, not a transmitter.
In an LTE signal (or most broadband wireless systems) the receiver is looking for a 'noise floor' of less than say -110dBm or so . I'm used to beating -116dBm. Any source that makes noise that the receiver can 'see' over this threshold will degrade performance. Of course this talking about a wireless system, and the article is suggesting that it's a cable system.... so...
A cable system is the same thing, except RF is trapped in a cable. The cable company's signal is basically unlicensed and VERY broadband RF. In some cases it looks like 3G umts and more modern systems look like OFDM LTE RF. No harm as long as the cable is sealed up. If there is a crack or leak then the problems start. Any 'egress' or leak out from the cable can cause issues on licensed (and unlicensed) wireless systems. AND ANY LEAK INTO THE CABLE 'INGRESS' can swamp the receiver at the cable company's head end - killing service. S/N over threshold. Maybe TV still worked; maybe the noise was only in the internet portion of the cable company's spectrum. Most modern cable companies can 'hop' around and avoid the interference, but if the noise is broadband enough there is no way around it.
(edit:spelling and comment)
Finding issues like this was my job for the past 6 years or so. These issues are more easily explained when you look at the characteristics of a receiver, not a transmitter.
In an LTE signal (or most broadband wireless systems) the receiver is looking for a 'noise floor' of less than say -110dBm or so . I'm used to beating -116dBm. Any source that makes noise that the receiver can 'see' over this threshold will degrade performance. Of course this talking about a wireless system, and the article is suggesting that it's a cable system.... so...
A cable system is the same thing, except RF is trapped in a cable. The cable company's signal is basically unlicensed and VERY broadband RF. In some cases it looks like 3G umts and more modern systems look like OFDM LTE RF. No harm as long as the cable is sealed up. If there is a crack or leak then the problems start. Any 'egress' or leak out from the cable can cause issues on licensed (and unlicensed) wireless systems. AND ANY LEAK INTO THE CABLE 'INGRESS' can swamp the receiver at the cable company's head end - killing service. S/N over threshold. Maybe TV still worked; maybe the noise was only in the internet portion of the cable company's spectrum. Most modern cable companies can 'hop' around and avoid the interference, but if the noise is broadband enough there is no way around it.
(edit:spelling and comment)
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Do you think that the TV was hooked up to cable and sending the pulse out that way? No, on second thought that couldn't be it as they crew found it walking around with a spectrum analyzer. Could the TV make a strong enough pulse thru the air to get into a wired system?
Over 40 years ago when I was a cable installer, we found a house that had a TV antenna about 10 feet from our cable line with the antenna pointed right at the cable tap. It was a leaking cable tap and he was getting all the channels for free with his antenna set up. I was impressed with his ingenuity and begged management just to leave it alone. But no, we had to change out the leaky tap. 😉
Over 40 years ago when I was a cable installer, we found a house that had a TV antenna about 10 feet from our cable line with the antenna pointed right at the cable tap. It was a leaking cable tap and he was getting all the channels for free with his antenna set up. I was impressed with his ingenuity and begged management just to leave it alone. But no, we had to change out the leaky tap. 😉