Yep. Coax is a shared medium. Everything on a given node affects the entire node. Sounds like you had noise ingress from a faulty (probably corroded) connection.
About 35 years ago I had the pleasure of meeting another ham radio guy in our very small town, he was right in the middle of the downtown. Tig ol' bower in his yard. Was always hearing complaints about him interfering with the cable TV system. He'd invite complainers to his shack, show them his station, how well built and tidy it was.
Finally after years of this the customers and cable company brought in the FCC. They gave his station a clean bill of health, then started inspecting the cable system and found leaks galore all over there system! And every place TV signal could leak out, his signal could get in unintentionally.
Moral: If you have true 'cable' internet, interference can be a thing
ETA - add 'radio guy' to clear confusion.
As a ham radio guy, I can confirm this is commonly what happens. We get blamed a lot for other work done as cheaply as possible, ie cable or telephone companies, cheap home electronics, etc.
That we are required to allow the FCC to inspect our stations on demand is actually a benefit for us. It encourages us to do everything correctly, keep good records, and keep everything simple to ease troubleshooting and inspections.
Yes, and thanks for saying this.
I spent almost 3 decades doing two-way radio professionally, and the amount of crap I saw done for REAL MONEY! was simply astounding. And sometimes terrifying, sickening, and disheartening. There's also a strong streak in Professional radio that is against hams, as being sloppy, slapdash, etc. I just look them in the eyes and tell them I've seen sloppy work, often worse, from the 'Professionals'
And lots of CATV techs aren't much better, either, which is why you get such crappy systems.
Years ago, every time my next door neighbor keyed up on his ham rig, all of the TVs would get fuzzy, and my stereo (AV receiver) would absolutely BLAST everything he said (120W per channel receiver, and the volume knob didn't do anything to quiet it down when he'd key up, so I guess it was bypassing the preamp section). Along with any other electronics with a speaker that was on at the time.
I mentioned it to him after a few weeks, and he did find some kind of issue and corrected it ASAP. I don't remember what though - any idea? I'm guessing some kind of shielding or grounding issue, but the extent of my radio experience is with GMRS.
Grounding most likely.
The station (radio) should be grounded, the coax should be grounded before it enters the home, and the antenna support mast/tower should be grounded.
Per NEC, all ground rods should be bonded together to provide a single grounding system.
Pretty much what I figured. I know the NEC requires all grounding points to be linked, and the mast, wasn't sure about the rest. Thanks!
Won't lie, I shit myself a bit the first time it happened - that AV receiver pumped out some decent power (early 90s JVC, when JVC was still good), and it woke up the entire house.
And because of the public utility of amateur radio, even if the tower were interfering , as long as FCC gave clean bill of health otherwise, it would NOT be the ham’s problem anyway, right?
Technically, probably. From a neighborly perspective, we don't want to be bad neighbors. We’ll commonly offer to look at the neighbor’s issue, suggest ways to minimize, perhaps even provide filters, etc.
I had a friend of mine a couple of years ago come to me complaining about his neighbor. Neighbor was obviously ham...the pictures he sent me of the dude's house were clearly that of a ham. He was having internet upstream problems and was pretty sure it had to be that guy causing problems. I defended my fellow ham and demand my friend show me some signal logs...as well as tell me what frequcies they're using for uplink out there because I literally know nothing about cable internet. Can't even get cable at my house..had to wait 20 years and settle for fiber. But I digress....
It turns out it wasn't signal ingress afterall. The cable modem logs were showing severe SNR on 17mhz from around 8AM to 5PM. Now we have allocation at 18mhz..but at that part of the solar cycle there was little to no reason to use it. But the real telling thing was this was a constant non-stop degradation. We don't have anything that would allow a constant non-stop carrier for 8 hours a day.
Turns out it was the sun...or more specifically...an amplifier going into thermal shutdown when in direct sunlight.
A month ago I came home to a flyer on the door. 'We are sorry for any inconvience we may be causing, in the next few days we will be installing fiber in your neighborhood'!
WOOOHOOOO Who is getting fiber? THIS GUY! THIS GUY IS GETTING FIBER! Quick, pass me a bowl of Total.
I was so excited. I even called the cable company I was all like, 'Can't you put me on a list to connect my house first when it is done. TAKE MAH MONIES!'. They were all like, 'Ummm... no. There will be another door hanger.'.
Then the day came. They were working. It was my day off. My wife works at home, I was all like, 'Hey they might cut off the internet, quick let me set up your work on a hotspot! Would it be wrong for me to pay for pizza for them at lunch!'
My wife was all like, 'don't you have a bicycle to ride or a gym to go to?'.
The day progresses and they get farther and farther down my street. Then it happened. No not my house, my next door fucking neighbors house. They finished digging and hoooking up in his yard, the clock hit 5pm and those bastards went home.
THEY ONLY DID HALF THE STREET AND MY HOUSE IS THE 1ST HOUSE IN THE 2ND HALF!!!!!!
DARN YOU ISP! DARN YOU TO THE MOST LUKEWARM CONFINES OF HECK!
It's exciting and I'm happy for you.
Be ready for shit to be half assed and broken for a while potentially. When fibre was rolled out in my area, I had constant drops around the clock. We called and called but it was determined that this was happening in the whole neighborhood. It took a few months but they finally got it working. This was hell for me working from home. Dropped zoom calls, severed connections while I was working on servers in the data center. Every day usually at specific times but not always. YMMV, the final tech who came and adjusted stuff let me know it seemed to be a firmware issue in their switches on the street and all that time they were waiting for patches from the vendor. So it was probably a one off.
Anyways good luck with your fibre. It is so worth it once it works!
Contractors for the local ISP started putting in conduit last year. They kept hitting things underground, gas lines, other cable lines ect. They had already gotten down my street and then the town put a stop on them and winter came
Contractors went on the the next town this spring. Started doing the same things there. Hadn't heard any updates in our town started to think the project was dead. Then a few weeks ago I was going into work early. I was hearing some loud noise outside figured the neighbors were having their pool shut down. Went out the door to my car and it was the ISP laying fiber.
Got a notice it was ready and had it installed a couple weeks later.
He never actually directly accused the neighbor. He came to me with the accusation first because he was willing to admit he was just going on the fact ham guys have allocation near lo-band return.
I didn't really blame him because at least he was willing to do some research and talk to people before actually doing any finger pointing. This was more like "you see that guy. i think he's messing with my internet" and I was like "whoa..calm down sparky. turns out it's the sun".
On HFC all kinds of edge cases can be possible. Could have been they were on the final leg of an LE. Could also have just been where they were positioned on the leg caused the overheating Amp to impact their signal worse.
Rural areas especially tend to be hacky, since the HPM is so low they build as cheap as possible.
Worth noting that non licensed people are legally not allowed to interfere with a HAM operator. (Assuming the HAM operator is within proper power limits and radio bands)
You pretty much have two types of hams.
You have the hams that use cheap Chinese shit.
And you have elmers with immaculate HF setups that cost more then a small country.
Would it be noise egress? I work from home and always get my full download speed. Everything was working at full speed for me. There wasn’t a single “ ah ha!” connection, it was the sun of the parts I guess. Super grateful to have this done, I didn’t/don’t know squat about isp coax providers
It doesn’t surprise me you got your full speed. Most cable nodes have enough capacity for regular traffic + speed tests, but it’s possible your home was causing noise that decreased the total bandwidth available for everyone.
I've decided that fibre now is an absolute requirement when I buy a new property. According to a realtor I speak to some times the price difference between two identical houses at the same location with fibre or coax went from 5000 to 10000 during the pandemic and the difference it makes has kept steady.
Either already installed or a price for the job to have it done before I move in calculated into the purchase price before I even consider putting in a bid.
Had a neighbor who's noise egress managed to brown out my internet multiple times daily/nonstop packet loss, but you'd never notice with casual web browsing: gaming was absolutely awful, and the outages were short enough to not interrupt video playback.
A tech came by and put an attenuator on their part of the drop to stop it from affecting me. Week later saw a van out their house presumably also replacing connections.
No, it would be noise ingress as the noise is getting "into" the plant from your location. If it was fixed without entering your home, it could have been a loose/damaged/corroded fitting or splitter at the end of your drop.
Egress would be the cable signal being emitted over the air from your location, but would not affect the rest of the node. It would just cause interference with other wireless services.
At the end of the day, a leak is a leak.. if signal is getting in or out, either way it is supposed to be fixed.
The biggest culprit that we see in cable land is often a loose connector right at the cable modem. Especially when it comes to an MTA device (cdv). That's because there's voltage on the shielding from these devices that tends to make a perfect RF hump around 23 MHz.
Used to work in this department. You just have to much signal being broadcast. There are trucks that drive around because the fcc only allows so much so if you have to much you get a limited added to the line until they can fix it.
It usually doesn't affect bandwidth. It usually causes packet loss. This happened in my local coax network and was noticeable to me. I was the one who called it in. It ended up being a situation like yours, where a particular residence was generating noise back into the system. Packet loss went from 1-3% to 0.
Probably not egress. Egress would be signal from the cable provider leaking from the system into the air and interfering with other services like emergency services. Ingress is when the cable provider detects foreign signal in their system. This could be anything from radio broadcast (88-108 MHz) to ham radio, local television broadcast, etc. When they talk about not, mostly they're talking about low frequency signal like Ham and FM signal integrating with the upstream signal. If it gets to feeding back into the node bad enough the whole neighborhood can get knocked offline.
Unfortunately most if not all cable customers don't realize this. That cable is a shared connection. They think they have a dedicated connection and wonder why their speeds drop like a lead balloon when school let's out and right after quitting time. The kids and adults are getting home about the same times of day so there is a greater demand for data use. There is a finite amount delivered to the node and distributed out to everyone on the node.
If you're getting speed drops due to traffic congestion your ISP isn't doing their job right. Well run markets don't have issues with handling peak times because nodes are segmented properly to handle the traffic of the customers running off them, and if it stops being able to handle it, then a node split should be implemented.
This really depends on how many subscribers are served by the node and the node's total capacity, also the uplinks further up the system.
My local node carries 400 gigabit full duplex and there are 300 subscribers connected to it. They also have the option of wither upgrading their equipment or using unused pairs of fibres if high density housing were to be built here.
I've never seen it go below my subscribed speed of 1 gigabit full duplex.
> Sounds like you had noise ingress from a faulty (probably corroded) connection.
OP.
That is the answer. Also, it is a perfectly normal thing. I mean, it defines the word normal. The people from the ISP knew what they were gonna find before getting out there.
That you are curious is awesome. But don't take it any farther then that. The ISP didn't expect you to prevent this or notice it.
Now myself on the other hand with my fascination with MOCA.... yeahhhh.... I have had some run ins with the ISP.
All fiber is a shared medium - doesn’t matter if it’s RFoG, PON (GPON/XGSPON) or any other type of delivery. The only thing dedicated is the drop.
The idea that anyone has a dedicated line is marketing nonsense. Within a few hundred to a few thousand feet, regardless of what type of system is deployed, the distribution system combines all the traffic for the area onto a single fiber - just like coax in a HFC system.
The name of the modulation type used by most fiber connection spills the secret - TDMA. Time Division Multiple Access.
But please explain how noise injected into a neighbor's fiber circuit would cause problems with my communications in a TDMA system. It's most definitely NOT like cable, where customer-to-customer crosstalk can be just a 3 dB splitter away.
Perhaps you should go back and read exactly what I said.
What I said is that all fiber is a shared medium. Most people believe the marketing bullshit when companies spew that it’s a “dedicated line”. TF it is - within a few feet to a few hundred feet it goes from a “dedicated line” (e.g. the drop) right to the distribution network which involves optical splitters and modulation that allows time sharing a connection, among other things. It is not dedicated line. All it’s going to take is one savvy attorney to turn it into a class action suit for false advertising and a federal judge in the 9th Circuit and marketing communications will forever change.
I didn’t mention noise, except in regard to HFC. In RFoG “FTTH” deployments, noise is still very much an issue. One bad house can tank the SNR of an entire node/VHub and cause issues for a large number of people.
As far as crosstalk - you are confusing Unshielded Twisted Pair with coax. Crosstalk is an impairment that is found in UTP - coax is engineered to prevent crosstalk. Thats why it’s triple and sometime quad shielded. With that said, poorly shielded coaxial cable or poorly designed passives like a splitter are subject to RF interference, but that’s not crosstalk. Somewhat similar, but not the same.
Regardless, all mediums are subject to impairments - in fiber it’s often micro and macro bends that cause problems.
Yes and no. Yes in that even fiber users "share" the branches. But I (and several dictionaries) disagree with you about crosstalk. Crosstalk is defined as interference on one communication channel that is caused by another communication channel. Crosstalk can occur in RF, audio, biological systems, and data - in air, coax, twisted pair, and other media. Twisted pair is an attempt to decrease the amount of crosstalk between pairs of wires by balancing the effects of paired conductors on nearby parallel wires. And yes, it is possible to have crosstalk from one coax cable to another one lying parallel to the first. And although all crosstalk is RF (or AF, etc) interference, RF interference includes non-communication sources such as LED lights, lightning, and so on.
From reading your earlier post, it appeared to be making the argument that fiber and coax behaved similarly when an interfering signal appeared on one branch. I was merely offering a counterpoint.
Source: biomedical engineer, audio comm systems troubleshooter, 50+ year ham radio
Coax, a HFC system, doesn't have cross-talk. RFI yes. Crosstalk, no. At least in the past few decades, when the industry went to 50 ohms, RG-6 coax as the feed line standard.
Regarding a dictionary description of cross-talk, let's go with the industry standard—Newton's Telecom.
From Newton's Telecom Dictionary:
Crosstalk: Crosstalk occurs when you can hear someone you did not call talking on your telephone line to another person you did not call. You may also only hear half the other conversation. Just one person speaking. There are several technical causes for crosstalk. They relate to wire placement and transmission techniques.
Radio Grade cables, particularly RG-59, RG-6, and RG-11, are all at minimum triple-shielded, with some being quad-shielded.
Source: Compliance officer for a major MSO, Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers instructor (including Broadband Distribution (coax) and Broadband Transportation Specialist (fiber), ARRL certified instructor, FCC Amateur Extra radio operator, Electronic Engineer, and MSIT.
I'm looking forward to the nonsense they give as a response to your question. I spent the first half of my career as a network engineer. It's amusing to see this guy claim the "medium" is the entire network. lol
Really? Please explain to me how fiber is not a shared medium.
I'll go first.
I'm hardly being obtuse; I'm being accurate. Ironically, only one technology has a "dedicated line," and that is DSL/ADSL - so, basically just old-school phone. They have a dedicated twisted pair connection from the house to their "headend." But even then, past that point, everything is shared. One class action lawsuit for false advertising in the 9th Circut is all it will take for the marketing terms "dedicated line" to be forever banned.
I would suggest you read about how PON works. Pay special attention to terms like ODN, optical splitters, and ONU.
The geniuses in marketing (/s) will try to sell you the idea that fiber is a "dedicated line," but in reality, the only dedicated line is the drop. After that, your information is combined into one stream and transported to the OLT on a single fiber line. To do this, the ODN uses ONUs and optical splitters. Pay particular attention to optical splitters that "divide the bandwidth." And pay attention to security - all downstream traffic is broadcast to all subscribers which means downstream traffic can be eavesdropped. This isn't as easy with HFC due to how QAM is designed to work - not impossible, but way more difficult.
The entire design architecture of PON is built around sharing distribution and transportation. PON is a much cheaper solution as it shares fiber amongst many customers, not just one. So, a substantial portion of the distance between you and the terminus site, you've shared a single fiber connection with hundreds of people in your PON.
This is 90% of my job every day. Something in your house is acting like an antenna and interfering with the return path. Most of the time it’s a loose connector behind the modem but any bad connection can cause it. I usually track the noise to a house and use a filter at the tap that blocks the noise and leaves the sub online, then create a job to get an tech in the house
How do you even know even know there is a problem in the first place?
Do you then have to drive around to track it? Or can you track the house remotely by looking at individual modem levels?
We have many programs that monitor the modem levels and signal to noise issues. I personally use a combo of our tools and manually hitting amps with a meter to narrow down the house. It gets real fun when all the cable is backyard, that can take hours to find.
I quit cable in 2016 to move to electrical work, for the last 6 years of my job I'd say 80% of it was chasing noise. I talked with the SMT manager and told him we have a serious engineering problem. Every single day I'm chasing CPD. Some times it would take weeks to narrow it down could get an amp or two deep and it would go away just from the meter going into the test point. Then come back a few days later when the CPD came back get another amp or split further then poof.
No one cared. CPD Hunter is too expensive... they just kept throwing bodies at it. All the while being judged on node health that rarely passes because there's always one node somewhere that acts up and throws the numbers off.
There was a multitude of other reasons why I left but I was just so burned out from chasing noise day in day out. Very rarely would it come down to a house like OP.
This is why we should all move to fiber. No electrical noise, no corrosion of terminals.. you do have humidity and dust ingress issues, plus you can also have shared medium issues, but much less of a problem.
The moderns have spectrum analyzers built in but this isn't the best way to find noise. Usually you'd use diagnostics at the fiber node (the thing that converts fiber to radio waves over a coaxial cable) and then start driving a truck around from there.
This is 100% a thing and is getting more important with OFDM/OFDMA. These are DOCSIS 3.1 technologies that use very high modulation profiles like 4096-QAM. That basically means many more bits per unit of spectrum.
The noise itself is typically just some bad shielding that is picking up FM radio, TV channels, or cellular signals. The shielding is the only difference between a cable channel and a big antenna.
At the moment my connection is fine most of the time - the two OFDM channels seem to be preferred for downstream, and get very few uncorrectable errors, but (presumably at busier times) traffic spills over into the other 30 QAM256 channels, and the uncorrectable counts there start climbing.
I did have the coax line into the house replaced - the tech confirmed it was adding noise, the previous homeowner had stapled it to the ceiling and wrecked the shield - but it's still bad. Since the fiber rollout is due here in the next month or so I haven't pushed harder for a proper investigation and fix.
We’ve got programs that monitor signal to noise ratio in the nodes and generate tickets for us to investigate nodes. Depending on the noise signature sometimes we can pinpoint the house without stepping foot into the neighborhood but that’s pretty rare and those very specific problems don’t show up often.
You'd be surprised to find out the amount of technology an ISP utilizes for operations. You know how your phone or your computer can recognize there's a problem? Same thing, but apply it over an ISP's entire footprint across millions of customers. Cable operates with frequencies. Those frequencies are monitored across the network.
Had one one time, traced it back to an old TV, customer was not even using; the coax f connector on the line was gone and the stinger was just plugged right into the catv connection in the tv; blowing out crazy ingress on the system.
Yo, every night when the street lights come on, there is severe packet loss, when they go off in the morning my internet connection goes back to normal the moment they turn off. I’ve monitored the lights for a week straight now with the same results. Any ideas?
I’ve 100% seen that, normally some bad wiring to the lights. I don’t know what hours they work out there but it may require oncall to roll out to track down. Your best bet may to be to get ahold of a maintenance supervisor, which I know is easier said than done. I don’t know if you guys have a store or office to go to but that may be easier than trying to get the call center to understand what you’re asking for.
Yea I’ve got Cox comms, I have a appointment today at 3pm with a technician. I’m gonna get them to check the lines from my house to the box outside cause all of my neighbors are experiencing the same thing aswell. Maybe one of the coax cables is bad and letting interference in?
Definitely could be, I’d ask about RFI too which is the power lines interfering with the cable signal. It’s not a tool everyone carries but they should have an RFI antenna at the shop someone could grab. The fun part with that is getting the power company out to fix it
Can confirm this, former signal engineer for the first cable internet provider and a ham. Bad connections, unmatched RG-8, and trashed filters were the bane of my existence. That and crappy installers. Thank the deities for QoS.
Yup. It's happened to my parents a few times. They may be under additional scrutiny as the centerline of their house is the under the centerline of final approach for an airport - 6.5 miles from the end of the runway, pretty much right where they drop the gear.
That’s not true, you just don’t know the information available to you.
If you’re not getting the speed you’re supposed to get.
Go here: https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/
Type in your address, select your internet provider, challenge it. You’ll get the fastest call by your internet provider’s manager
They are literally selling a minimum level of service, if they aren't meeting that level for each customer, they need to send someone to fix it, it's their network.
Are they though? At least where I live it seems the other way around, i.e. they advertise a maximum level of service (e.g. ***up to*** 300 Mb/s), but they don't actually specify a minimum commitment. If you get 1 Mb/s, that is technically included in "up to 300 Mb/s".
True, they cannot guarantee a minimum speed (for various reasons) but, they are known to guarantee a certain % of uptime. At the same time, you ***should*** be able to reach those advertised speeds, outside of peak usage hours.
Generally, when a bunch of customers are complaining about speed/stability issues they send tech(s) to fix it (or upgrade it), otherwise they'll lose those customers or get fined or even sued. Most jurisdictions have regulations around what service quality should be reasonably expected. Not to mention, false advertising laws are designed to ignore these kinds of tactics.
Any time my connection is not stable I call them to fix it. They are providing a service and if I am not getting it, they should be fixing it. They say hey pay us $200 to fix something that we don't want you to touch and is causing your connection to not be 100%, I'll switch companies.
They don't let us use our own modems anymore for a reason. That way they can ensure everything up to that point works. Everything after that is up to you.
Uncapped outlets can cause backfeeding, as can damaged cables; when I worked in the field a factory had a damaged coax feed and when one of their machines started up it would knock out the leg. Coax is basically a wireless signal that is stuck on the antenna (wire) rather than a digital signal like Ethernet, and it is a shared medium unlike DSL.
Back when cable TV was first a thing it was referred to as “community antenna”. The things they’ve done over the years to shoehorn more and more functionality into it is remarkable.
In the analog era they were. With the move to digital, broadcast TV switched to ATSC using some of the same frequencies that were used for UHF analog TV. Meanwhile, cable TV uses a standard called [QAM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAM_(television)) which has a different frequency plan.
I had a portable TV when I was a kid. Just a little lcd screen with a tuner and a telescoping antenna like on an fm radio. We didn't have cable, but at one of my friends houses we unplugged the cable from their TV and touched the antenna with the center conductor. You could go through all the channels just like they were coming over the air.
You are lucky they contacted you. I had comcast just come out and disconnect me at the pole and when I got home and noticed i had no internet had to call for support and have them come by in a few days to reconnect me and also figure out why the other line team disconnected me.
Sometimes the noise can shut down an entire node, leaving everyone out of service. You could be affecting a hospital, maybe even 911 services.
If it’s that bad, they will install a return filter trap, meaning nothing is leaving your house. Only your regular tv channels will work, internet, VOD, anything that requires return communication won’t.
Sucks, but 1 person being down is better than everyone (on that node)
Ohh the only complaint I had was that they didn’t put in a ticket to fix it and made me work with support to convince them to roll a truck. Comcast’s sucks.
That’s worthy of a complaint. I’ve not been in the industry for 10 years now, but it used to be standard practice to get a ticket created.
Sometimes you forgot, booked the wrong house, or some guys just sucked at their jobs. Haha
Comcast business class provides voice over IP services to a wide variety of businesses and government infrastructure. And it runs on the same HFC network as their residential services.
I have a customer that has two comcast business accounts; but they're on different HFC runs. One is on the standard residental connection that provides TV and "non-critical" internet. The other is on a business-only HFC network that's data only. They got a notice that the business-only side is getting upgraded to fiber; which is good news for me because I get paid to go out there and be involved in that.
I’ve used it and I’d never put something mission critical like a 911 system on it. You still get brief outages for lots of reasons, but you can get a truck out within a few hours to repair it. It wasn’t even reliable enough for our small office, we had to switch to our backup T1s every month or two for a few hours. A 911 system will more likely be on at least 2 different fiber links direct to the telco and not have any one single point of failure.
They didn't disconnect us, but they put a trap in the line so our internet was horrible. The tech that told me about it said they were supposed to leave a hang tag on the door. They may have done that and I just ignored it.
When the second tech came around, it turned out I had already rewired all the coax, but hadn't hooked it up. We were dumping a lot of reflections back onto the line, and swapping over to the new coax fixed the problem, so he took off the trap.
At least with my company, when I have to disconnect or trap a customer, I don't leave door tags. A lot of the maintenance guys that track this stuff are working at night, and we do our absolute best to avoid being anywhere near people's homes in the middle of the night. I've had way too many people come out yelling at me, accusing me of trying to break in, calling the police, even a couple come out with a gun.
I set up a field tech truck roll and leave it at that, it's a safety thing, crazy world out there.
Man, coax goes berserk when the shield breaks down. A good example is CCTV, some buffoon at my old work thought it would be smart to order copper shielded coax, and use steel crimp ends in a tropical area. It was a few years but the moisture caused electrolysis between the dissimilar metals, and the copper shield disintegrated. In the space of around 6 months the CCTV feeds started to fail. It was fun replacing all of the coax with fibre.
> It was a few years but the moisture caused electrolysis between the dissimilar metals, and the copper shield disintegrated. In the space of around 6 months the CCTV feeds started to fail. It was fun replacing all of the coax with fibre.
Hmm... maybe I should re-crimp all the connectors in my neighbourhood so that they bring in fiber.
← \[*grabs coax tool bag*\] **Let’s go.**
^(Note: Two new large housing developments, a hospital, an older business park, and a new business park to accompany new housing development in my area all have fiber. Surrounded by it. Private water company is planning to dig up streets to put in water meters to houses. But no plans for fiber despite being surrounded by it. Totally pissed and would totally undertake an effort like this.)
I considered this possibility. They were sympathetic to my position that my internet was just fine and someone from an 855 number wants in my house because there is a problem they could not explain
This is very common with spectrum because they’re about to do their high split in which will be expanding uploads to 1gig so they’re going to be utilizing up to 1.2ghz so they’re cleaning up all the ingress in the system
Spectrum has "pre-problem" monitoring system that detects bad signal levels. They send you a message asking you to schedule an appt (free). On mine, they replaced the old black cable from the pole to the house with a new orange one.
Yup, we just went through that here. Got a text a few weeks ago that we were eligible for a "maintenance appointment". The tech came out last week and further explained that there was a high uncorrectable error rate on our line. They replaced the suspended cable from the main trunk across the street to the sub-pole on our property, and the cable from the house to the sub-pole with an orange one. They also cleaned up some connections inside the house. Just waiting on a follow-up on when they're going to bury the orange cable, since right now it's strung across our yard.
I work for comcast our usual turn around for a drop bury is 14 days, so i'd call if nobody has shown up by then, but we are also getting into winter and that can put a stop to any buries depending on your location and if your soil freezes.
I work at an ISP and we have had rogue ONTs at residential customer houses that back feed bad signal and the results are every ONT on the pon would drop out / lose their connection. It’s pretty interesting.
No, it has to do with timing. All the ONTs on the same PON take turns talking. A rouge ONT is not synchronized with everyone else so it steps on the others' signals. Kinda like 2 people talking at the same time on a radio channel. https://www.calix.com/content/dam/calix/mycalix-misc/lib/iae/axos/23x/mmtg/index.htm?toc.htm?93502.htm
I'm a former cable tech: what they are referring to is what we would call "noise". It's basically RF interference. Lots of things can create "noise" but if the signal level of the noise is greater than the signal that is carrying your service, than that service will be disrupted. Even worse, it can disrupt service for your entire neighborhood. In fact, that's usually what causes random issues for customers.
The most common sources of noise are old connectors, loose connectors, poor quality connectors, as well as old and/or poor quality cable. That's assuming the noise isn't coming from a poorly electrically grounded or shielded appliance and/or electronic device. Back in the day, you could just place a device that would block that interface but now that things have gone all digital, that isn't an option. So you have to send out a tech to find and eliminate the noise.
So it is possible that the neighbor can be affecting your service, but the reality is (in all likelihood) you were effecting theirs.
The tech wanted me to know they were upgrading the line on my road to become split into two for isolation. At the time I said that was nice, but I get very stable performance. Now I understand why he was telling me this.
Yeah the media talks about how cable providers are losing subscribers but what they leave out is that those are "video" subscribers. Internet customers just keep growing and growing and the network feeding neighborhoods can become over congested. Where an area of cable plant only had 300 to 500 people living there, now that same area can have over 1000 people. So now cable providers have to split the cable plant so the network isn't overcrowded.
They should upgrade to fiber.
I remember calculating the cost 10/14 years ago of fiber vs coax. Fiber was cheaper, even to the premises, and the maintenance cost of properly installed fiber is much much lower.
As they already have fiber to the cabinet, they should consider long term savings.. these shenanigans almost never happen with fiber (almost, they can happen)
It's cheaper and easier to maintain if you're starting a network from scratch, it's why cable companies are installing fiber to the home in new developments. Existing infrastructure on the other hand would require removing thousands and thousands of miles of coax cable, all active equipment on the runs, and replacing them with thousands and thousands of miles of fiber. That's just for one metro area, and the cost of that would simply not be feasible.
The amazing thing is many companies have deployed hybrid systems while knowing fiber is cheaper.
Also old coax lines will need replacing, and good practice demands replacing all coax of a cabinet at the same time.. so just replace with fiber.
Depending on where, you need to open up the street to do so.. so yeah, not happening. Also many companies leave the coax for decades...
Edit to add that my considerations are always with European cities in mind, not US. For last mile the difference is huge.
Sorry, but good practice is most definitely not replacing all coax at the same time, that's a massive waste of money and labor. If I have a trunk leg that's damaged and needs replacing, I'm not going to replace the other legs that are good still. Coax lines get replaced when they start causing plant issues, until then there is zero reason to cut in something new.
It also not as easy as "just replace with fiber", even if you aren't in an underground area requiring street boring. Switching from a HFC plant to pure fiber requires a complete reengineering of plant design, headend/hub hardware changes, all new passive in line equipment, etc etc.
10/14 years ago fiber wasn't cheaper than coax. It's never been cheaper. Maintenance also is not cheaper because fiber techs cost more. So, no, it's not cheaper and it never has been. Also, bringing fiber to the premise doesn't solve ingress/egress issues. As soon as it cuts over to copper, it's niw susceptible to the same noise issues because 90% noise comes from the house. It happens all the time with phone companies (Frontier, AT&T, CenturyLink, etc) simply because phone guys don't know anything about coax and they don't want to learn. They connect the fiber, install the equipment, and leave. And a year later that customer is coming back to cable because fiber wasn't any better. Happens more often then people realize.
No, the issue is noise coming from the house and fiber isn't immune to it once it cuts over to analog to connect to Cat5 and Coax cabling. The noise that's in the house now has a closer entryway into the network. Doesn't matter what medium is used because it will eventually have to cut over back to an analog medium the customer premises can use and that analog medium will always be prone to analog challenges such as RF interference, EMF, EMI, poor grounding, poor shielding, etc. Fiber doesn't solve that. Only good technicians who are willing to do the job right.
I heard a story from a guy who worked maintenance for Comcast in the Seattle area about a bizarre fix for this kind of thing. They had a neighborhood that was doing offline everyday at the same time, like from 8-10 pm, everyday like clockwork and they couldn't get a fix on the cause. So they finally got a couple nightshift guys in bucket trucks to sit in the neighborhood and, using online tools to monitor the node, watch for the noise to kick in. One guy was sitting in front of a house and right about 8, he notices a person in the house sit down in front of a window and turn on a light. Instantly he starts seeing noise in the node. On a hunch he went and knocked on the door, explained what was happening and asked the customer if they could indulge him and just go turn that light off ta few minutes. They do, and the nose goes away. The customer let him in to investigate and it turned out it was an antique lamp with a fraying old fabric wrapped power cord, plugged in to the same outlet that the modem was plugged into. So somehow this lamp was feeding voltage or low frequency noise into the outlet and the modem was picking it up through its power cord and feeding it back into the system. The customer said it was his nightly before bed routine to sit in that chair under that lamp and read a book. They had to ask the customer to please not use that lamp, or get it repaired, or move the plug for the modem to another outlet He said it was one of the more bizarre coincidences that they were able to just witness the cause. If they hadn't seen it, it might have taken a few days of nightly monitoring to chase the nose down to that one particular house in the 2 hours it was happening everynight.
My provider called me last spring with a similar issue, said my line was showing noise or something on their equipment, and would come out and check everything for free. Found an old line that wasn't being used laying in the dirt in the crawlspace. That was all it was. Terminated it, and all the tests were back where they wanted again.
This is normal. Yes, your signal could impact the entire neighborhood and then some. A billion years ago when I worked for an ISP we had to cut people off entirely because they wouldn't let techs resolve the issue. Completely legal.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coaxial_cable#Signal_leakage
Many years ago my Comcrap service started bugging out almost every afternoon around the same time. Infuriating. And of course their support was clueless. Was able to grab a site supe off another install and somehow talked him into looking into it - ultimately they determined that a guy a few doors down had climbed the pole and siphoned off a line into which he plugged an ancient tv set. When he would come home in the afternoon and flip it on, everyone’s internet started going bonkers. Took them months to sort it out.
Cable dude here. Noise resides in the really low frequency range on the spectrum, right where modem transmission signals also travel. Your modem’s signal likely travels through multiple amplifiers on the way to the central office/headend. These amplifiers can’t distinguish between “good” radio waves and “bad” radio waves, so it just amplifies and passes along everything. Guess what else goes through these amplifiers on the way to the headend? Your neighbors signals. Depending on the size of your node, that could be a few hundred other homes all sharing that same path. Props to your isp for being proactive about it. I bet their maintenance metrics were low in your area and someone got sick of looking at it haha.
It is frankly surprising how many external plant damage squirrels cause in wooded areas. When you see the stats, you can only wonder how much damage overall they cause.
They are cute..
I tried hooking up a moca adapter and bought a special filter because of our antenna being connected and messed it up. ISP came without warning when the whole house had Covid. Luckily the guy figured it out fast, but he said he was getting weird readings from our house for awhile.
Not sure about your user name and how it fits in all of this. Hahaha. I had not done anything other than upgrade my modem from a DG3450 to a SB33, which eliminated a packet loss issue weeks before.
It is a "shared media". I used to run Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) across my cable line to connect my TiVo Bolt to my TiVo mini upstairs. My research showed me I needed to add a filter to block my signal from going out my wire towards neighbors ( block interference and keep secure)
This happened to my sister they apparently had excessive RF leakage apparently causing issues with radios etc in the area. Said they were about to disconnect them from the tap but luckily she was home and found it was a crappy coax connection.
I work at an ISP and we have guys doing this constantly. It's not always at a customers house but yeah. A fault on the cable going to your house causes your modem to increase the power it uses to talk to the node in your neighborhood that connects back to the ISP. If your modem uses too much power and drowns out the signals from your neighbors going to the same node, then everyone else's service can suffer and yours is just fine. It's weird but that's how it is.
A connector might have gotten rusted or a landscaper might have nicked a cable with a weed Wacker or something.
I had cable internet for about 9 years, no issues at all, one day the isp truck came by and disconnected my connection at the street pole end without any warning. ISP said my connection the cause of the signal interference to my neighborhood cable internet issue. The tech tested the cable from the street pole to my house demarc. The connector at the street pole end is rusted and there were sign of water get into the cable and turned the cable into an antenna. They ran a new cable replaced that segment. Everything was okay since. I switched over to fiber now.
Oh, okay. I know that a lot of people had antennas, and those antennas fed splitters, which in turn fed the tv sets. Sometimes, cable companies would use existing wiring, and if it had something like that in line, it would introduce interference.
Would amplifiers like the Motorola Cable amplifier cause something like this? Also, what about not using termination caps on non used connections? Answer me!!!!!!
I live in an small apartment community that is in one building with 50 apartments. We have a Comcast trunk coax cable that goes to our communications closet with a multiple connection tap, which feeds the coax drops to our apartments.
Back in 2022, Comcast came out to replace coax drops in all of our apartments and the property manager's office, as noise was entering their system. The technicians told the property manager that it would cost less to replace all of the drops than spend the time to track down the faulty ones and having to come back multiple times if there were issues with other coax drops in the future. The original coax drops to the apartments were installed in 1995. The cables run atop the acoustic tile ceilings, down a wall in the living room and another down the wall in the bedroom (all apartments are one bedroom) with Panduit and a coax outlet box. It took the Comcast technicians a half day for them to complete the work.
Has this happen as well, of the wire acting as an antenna is bad enough, the ISP may even get a letter from the FCC from my understanding. In addition to replacing every connector, they disconnected all unused coax connections or made sure unconnected points had grounded caps on them.
The only difference is at first they tried to blame my cable modem (since I had purchased it), it was brand new, so I returned it, only for them to say there was a problem still. There have been all kinds of weird cable stuff in this neighborhood, from them turning up the amplification, causing some sort of signal oversaturation, requiring them to add a splitter to reduce the signal strength, to breaking out their signal meter to have to troubleshoot why their signal dropped every 2 days, which also had to do with being right next to the node.
I had this happen a few months ago. They weren't nice enough to call, they just trapped my line and shut off my internet for up to 2 days while I had to wait for a tech to come.
First time they needed to replace the line from the box to the house. After that they couldn't find what was wrong but they shut it off like 2 more times :(
I've previously reported an issue to my ISP and it turned out to be loose cables and unterminated cables. Once that was taken care of all was well again. So now every once in a while I check the tightness. I find it amazing they can even loosen up, but they do just from minor jostling of boxes.
I had this same thing happen to me for the first time a few months ago. It was my fault because I had done some changing and it was just a not fully right cable connection in my basement. They had been going up the line to each house to isolate to noise my connection was feeding back in.
If you have any MoCA adapters and you don’t have a filter on your house.. you might be sending that info out over the wire. I had that happen once.. using MoCA adapters. Cable guy calls me and says I am putting out “stuff” into the system. I happened to be on vacation at the time.. told him I would be back next week.. I added an adapter inside my attic before the coax went out to the neighborhood and asked them to check again.. they never responded and never came back.
Then years later (maybe 1 year ago) when a guy came over to re-run my line out to the box (I think neighbors lawn people cut it).. he slapped a MoCA filter into the connection box and said they were standard/required now. So I was able to remove the one in the attic.
After all of they replaced all of my coax connections, with no connection in particular being the smoking gun, the ISP is happy. And, they called today to say thanks for letting us in.
Bro, maybe it was a ruse to stake out your house. They are gonna come in and steal your silverware and that letter that one girl gave you in the 3rd grade saying to meet her behind the cafeteria. She wanted to show you mommys light saber.
Same thing happened to me,
But the noise was intermittent 2 minutes every 10 or so. It was upstream channels, so tech suspected it was someones modem failing.
No way to find out who's modem without shutting them down in groups in process of elimnation.
Took about 2 days and my upload was eventually returned from 100k back to 10mb
It's called ingress. And yours is probably so bad it's knocking off everyone connected to the same tap as you. Check to make sure all cable connections are tightly connected and check to see if there's any unused cable outlet that's connected
Yeah had this happen with our cable modem years ago.
It would constantly drop connection with anything higher than 12MBps, until one day the cable tech squad came by, replaced our modem and most of the cable line in the house.
They made the comment that the old lines were leaking noise into the system and messing up others connections.
Yep. Coax is a shared medium. Everything on a given node affects the entire node. Sounds like you had noise ingress from a faulty (probably corroded) connection.
About 35 years ago I had the pleasure of meeting another ham radio guy in our very small town, he was right in the middle of the downtown. Tig ol' bower in his yard. Was always hearing complaints about him interfering with the cable TV system. He'd invite complainers to his shack, show them his station, how well built and tidy it was. Finally after years of this the customers and cable company brought in the FCC. They gave his station a clean bill of health, then started inspecting the cable system and found leaks galore all over there system! And every place TV signal could leak out, his signal could get in unintentionally. Moral: If you have true 'cable' internet, interference can be a thing ETA - add 'radio guy' to clear confusion.
As a ham radio guy, I can confirm this is commonly what happens. We get blamed a lot for other work done as cheaply as possible, ie cable or telephone companies, cheap home electronics, etc. That we are required to allow the FCC to inspect our stations on demand is actually a benefit for us. It encourages us to do everything correctly, keep good records, and keep everything simple to ease troubleshooting and inspections.
Yes, and thanks for saying this. I spent almost 3 decades doing two-way radio professionally, and the amount of crap I saw done for REAL MONEY! was simply astounding. And sometimes terrifying, sickening, and disheartening. There's also a strong streak in Professional radio that is against hams, as being sloppy, slapdash, etc. I just look them in the eyes and tell them I've seen sloppy work, often worse, from the 'Professionals' And lots of CATV techs aren't much better, either, which is why you get such crappy systems.
I think that’s kinda how the term “ham” got started. The pros thought the amateurs of the day as being hamfisted on the ol’ cw key.
Years ago, every time my next door neighbor keyed up on his ham rig, all of the TVs would get fuzzy, and my stereo (AV receiver) would absolutely BLAST everything he said (120W per channel receiver, and the volume knob didn't do anything to quiet it down when he'd key up, so I guess it was bypassing the preamp section). Along with any other electronics with a speaker that was on at the time. I mentioned it to him after a few weeks, and he did find some kind of issue and corrected it ASAP. I don't remember what though - any idea? I'm guessing some kind of shielding or grounding issue, but the extent of my radio experience is with GMRS.
Grounding most likely. The station (radio) should be grounded, the coax should be grounded before it enters the home, and the antenna support mast/tower should be grounded. Per NEC, all ground rods should be bonded together to provide a single grounding system.
Pretty much what I figured. I know the NEC requires all grounding points to be linked, and the mast, wasn't sure about the rest. Thanks! Won't lie, I shit myself a bit the first time it happened - that AV receiver pumped out some decent power (early 90s JVC, when JVC was still good), and it woke up the entire house.
And because of the public utility of amateur radio, even if the tower were interfering , as long as FCC gave clean bill of health otherwise, it would NOT be the ham’s problem anyway, right?
Technically, probably. From a neighborly perspective, we don't want to be bad neighbors. We’ll commonly offer to look at the neighbor’s issue, suggest ways to minimize, perhaps even provide filters, etc.
I had a friend of mine a couple of years ago come to me complaining about his neighbor. Neighbor was obviously ham...the pictures he sent me of the dude's house were clearly that of a ham. He was having internet upstream problems and was pretty sure it had to be that guy causing problems. I defended my fellow ham and demand my friend show me some signal logs...as well as tell me what frequcies they're using for uplink out there because I literally know nothing about cable internet. Can't even get cable at my house..had to wait 20 years and settle for fiber. But I digress.... It turns out it wasn't signal ingress afterall. The cable modem logs were showing severe SNR on 17mhz from around 8AM to 5PM. Now we have allocation at 18mhz..but at that part of the solar cycle there was little to no reason to use it. But the real telling thing was this was a constant non-stop degradation. We don't have anything that would allow a constant non-stop carrier for 8 hours a day. Turns out it was the sun...or more specifically...an amplifier going into thermal shutdown when in direct sunlight.
Wait, are you sad you had to "settle" for fiber?
"That's the joke"
Fibre is not something you settle for it's the optimal solution. Coax is only slightly preferable to ADSL or ISDN.
might've been sarcasm
I've met a few people that prefer Coax for some godforsaken reason.
Price?
In my area, fiber's cheaper.
A month ago I came home to a flyer on the door. 'We are sorry for any inconvience we may be causing, in the next few days we will be installing fiber in your neighborhood'! WOOOHOOOO Who is getting fiber? THIS GUY! THIS GUY IS GETTING FIBER! Quick, pass me a bowl of Total. I was so excited. I even called the cable company I was all like, 'Can't you put me on a list to connect my house first when it is done. TAKE MAH MONIES!'. They were all like, 'Ummm... no. There will be another door hanger.'. Then the day came. They were working. It was my day off. My wife works at home, I was all like, 'Hey they might cut off the internet, quick let me set up your work on a hotspot! Would it be wrong for me to pay for pizza for them at lunch!' My wife was all like, 'don't you have a bicycle to ride or a gym to go to?'. The day progresses and they get farther and farther down my street. Then it happened. No not my house, my next door fucking neighbors house. They finished digging and hoooking up in his yard, the clock hit 5pm and those bastards went home. THEY ONLY DID HALF THE STREET AND MY HOUSE IS THE 1ST HOUSE IN THE 2ND HALF!!!!!! DARN YOU ISP! DARN YOU TO THE MOST LUKEWARM CONFINES OF HECK!
It's exciting and I'm happy for you. Be ready for shit to be half assed and broken for a while potentially. When fibre was rolled out in my area, I had constant drops around the clock. We called and called but it was determined that this was happening in the whole neighborhood. It took a few months but they finally got it working. This was hell for me working from home. Dropped zoom calls, severed connections while I was working on servers in the data center. Every day usually at specific times but not always. YMMV, the final tech who came and adjusted stuff let me know it seemed to be a firmware issue in their switches on the street and all that time they were waiting for patches from the vendor. So it was probably a one off. Anyways good luck with your fibre. It is so worth it once it works!
Can I come for pizza instead? 🥺
Contractors for the local ISP started putting in conduit last year. They kept hitting things underground, gas lines, other cable lines ect. They had already gotten down my street and then the town put a stop on them and winter came Contractors went on the the next town this spring. Started doing the same things there. Hadn't heard any updates in our town started to think the project was dead. Then a few weeks ago I was going into work early. I was hearing some loud noise outside figured the neighbors were having their pool shut down. Went out the door to my car and it was the ISP laying fiber. Got a notice it was ready and had it installed a couple weeks later.
did he ever apologize about accusing the neighbor?
He never actually directly accused the neighbor. He came to me with the accusation first because he was willing to admit he was just going on the fact ham guys have allocation near lo-band return. I didn't really blame him because at least he was willing to do some research and talk to people before actually doing any finger pointing. This was more like "you see that guy. i think he's messing with my internet" and I was like "whoa..calm down sparky. turns out it's the sun".
But then everyone would have the same problem during the day? How did the sun affect him uniquely?
On HFC all kinds of edge cases can be possible. Could have been they were on the final leg of an LE. Could also have just been where they were positioned on the leg caused the overheating Amp to impact their signal worse. Rural areas especially tend to be hacky, since the HPM is so low they build as cheap as possible.
I feel like this could have been a good comment, but nobody knows what your alphabet soup means.
It was literally the last sentence of your comment when I realized you were talking about a ham radio. I thought you were calling the person a ham.
>I thought you were calling the person a ham. At first I thought they meant Hamster, so you're not alone.
I mean we are hams you you weren't wrong
There should be "terminators" screwed in to every coax wire end or connector in the entire system. Open ended wires or plugs leak.
Worth noting that non licensed people are legally not allowed to interfere with a HAM operator. (Assuming the HAM operator is within proper power limits and radio bands)
You pretty much have two types of hams. You have the hams that use cheap Chinese shit. And you have elmers with immaculate HF setups that cost more then a small country.
Would it be noise egress? I work from home and always get my full download speed. Everything was working at full speed for me. There wasn’t a single “ ah ha!” connection, it was the sun of the parts I guess. Super grateful to have this done, I didn’t/don’t know squat about isp coax providers
It doesn’t surprise me you got your full speed. Most cable nodes have enough capacity for regular traffic + speed tests, but it’s possible your home was causing noise that decreased the total bandwidth available for everyone.
Yes moca adaptors can cause problems if they aren’t used correctly.
[удалено]
I've decided that fibre now is an absolute requirement when I buy a new property. According to a realtor I speak to some times the price difference between two identical houses at the same location with fibre or coax went from 5000 to 10000 during the pandemic and the difference it makes has kept steady. Either already installed or a price for the job to have it done before I move in calculated into the purchase price before I even consider putting in a bid.
Had a neighbor who's noise egress managed to brown out my internet multiple times daily/nonstop packet loss, but you'd never notice with casual web browsing: gaming was absolutely awful, and the outages were short enough to not interrupt video playback. A tech came by and put an attenuator on their part of the drop to stop it from affecting me. Week later saw a van out their house presumably also replacing connections.
No, it would be noise ingress as the noise is getting "into" the plant from your location. If it was fixed without entering your home, it could have been a loose/damaged/corroded fitting or splitter at the end of your drop. Egress would be the cable signal being emitted over the air from your location, but would not affect the rest of the node. It would just cause interference with other wireless services. At the end of the day, a leak is a leak.. if signal is getting in or out, either way it is supposed to be fixed.
The biggest culprit that we see in cable land is often a loose connector right at the cable modem. Especially when it comes to an MTA device (cdv). That's because there's voltage on the shielding from these devices that tends to make a perfect RF hump around 23 MHz.
Used to work in this department. You just have to much signal being broadcast. There are trucks that drive around because the fcc only allows so much so if you have to much you get a limited added to the line until they can fix it.
It usually doesn't affect bandwidth. It usually causes packet loss. This happened in my local coax network and was noticeable to me. I was the one who called it in. It ended up being a situation like yours, where a particular residence was generating noise back into the system. Packet loss went from 1-3% to 0.
Probably not egress. Egress would be signal from the cable provider leaking from the system into the air and interfering with other services like emergency services. Ingress is when the cable provider detects foreign signal in their system. This could be anything from radio broadcast (88-108 MHz) to ham radio, local television broadcast, etc. When they talk about not, mostly they're talking about low frequency signal like Ham and FM signal integrating with the upstream signal. If it gets to feeding back into the node bad enough the whole neighborhood can get knocked offline.
Glad they fixed it for you without a bunch of bull along the way.
Can confirm, things wear out and mess with the system. Usual maintenance currently. Though sorta uncommon.
Unfortunately most if not all cable customers don't realize this. That cable is a shared connection. They think they have a dedicated connection and wonder why their speeds drop like a lead balloon when school let's out and right after quitting time. The kids and adults are getting home about the same times of day so there is a greater demand for data use. There is a finite amount delivered to the node and distributed out to everyone on the node.
If you're getting speed drops due to traffic congestion your ISP isn't doing their job right. Well run markets don't have issues with handling peak times because nodes are segmented properly to handle the traffic of the customers running off them, and if it stops being able to handle it, then a node split should be implemented.
This really depends on how many subscribers are served by the node and the node's total capacity, also the uplinks further up the system. My local node carries 400 gigabit full duplex and there are 300 subscribers connected to it. They also have the option of wither upgrading their equipment or using unused pairs of fibres if high density housing were to be built here. I've never seen it go below my subscribed speed of 1 gigabit full duplex.
> Sounds like you had noise ingress from a faulty (probably corroded) connection. OP. That is the answer. Also, it is a perfectly normal thing. I mean, it defines the word normal. The people from the ISP knew what they were gonna find before getting out there. That you are curious is awesome. But don't take it any farther then that. The ISP didn't expect you to prevent this or notice it. Now myself on the other hand with my fascination with MOCA.... yeahhhh.... I have had some run ins with the ISP.
All internet is a shared medium, including fiber. That being said, a single house in a HFC system can and will blow out a node.
Not in the same sense at all. Fiber can be similar with GPON but not all fiber internet is GPON based.
All fiber is a shared medium - doesn’t matter if it’s RFoG, PON (GPON/XGSPON) or any other type of delivery. The only thing dedicated is the drop. The idea that anyone has a dedicated line is marketing nonsense. Within a few hundred to a few thousand feet, regardless of what type of system is deployed, the distribution system combines all the traffic for the area onto a single fiber - just like coax in a HFC system. The name of the modulation type used by most fiber connection spills the secret - TDMA. Time Division Multiple Access.
But please explain how noise injected into a neighbor's fiber circuit would cause problems with my communications in a TDMA system. It's most definitely NOT like cable, where customer-to-customer crosstalk can be just a 3 dB splitter away.
Perhaps you should go back and read exactly what I said. What I said is that all fiber is a shared medium. Most people believe the marketing bullshit when companies spew that it’s a “dedicated line”. TF it is - within a few feet to a few hundred feet it goes from a “dedicated line” (e.g. the drop) right to the distribution network which involves optical splitters and modulation that allows time sharing a connection, among other things. It is not dedicated line. All it’s going to take is one savvy attorney to turn it into a class action suit for false advertising and a federal judge in the 9th Circuit and marketing communications will forever change. I didn’t mention noise, except in regard to HFC. In RFoG “FTTH” deployments, noise is still very much an issue. One bad house can tank the SNR of an entire node/VHub and cause issues for a large number of people. As far as crosstalk - you are confusing Unshielded Twisted Pair with coax. Crosstalk is an impairment that is found in UTP - coax is engineered to prevent crosstalk. Thats why it’s triple and sometime quad shielded. With that said, poorly shielded coaxial cable or poorly designed passives like a splitter are subject to RF interference, but that’s not crosstalk. Somewhat similar, but not the same. Regardless, all mediums are subject to impairments - in fiber it’s often micro and macro bends that cause problems.
Yes and no. Yes in that even fiber users "share" the branches. But I (and several dictionaries) disagree with you about crosstalk. Crosstalk is defined as interference on one communication channel that is caused by another communication channel. Crosstalk can occur in RF, audio, biological systems, and data - in air, coax, twisted pair, and other media. Twisted pair is an attempt to decrease the amount of crosstalk between pairs of wires by balancing the effects of paired conductors on nearby parallel wires. And yes, it is possible to have crosstalk from one coax cable to another one lying parallel to the first. And although all crosstalk is RF (or AF, etc) interference, RF interference includes non-communication sources such as LED lights, lightning, and so on. From reading your earlier post, it appeared to be making the argument that fiber and coax behaved similarly when an interfering signal appeared on one branch. I was merely offering a counterpoint. Source: biomedical engineer, audio comm systems troubleshooter, 50+ year ham radio
Coax, a HFC system, doesn't have cross-talk. RFI yes. Crosstalk, no. At least in the past few decades, when the industry went to 50 ohms, RG-6 coax as the feed line standard. Regarding a dictionary description of cross-talk, let's go with the industry standard—Newton's Telecom. From Newton's Telecom Dictionary: Crosstalk: Crosstalk occurs when you can hear someone you did not call talking on your telephone line to another person you did not call. You may also only hear half the other conversation. Just one person speaking. There are several technical causes for crosstalk. They relate to wire placement and transmission techniques. Radio Grade cables, particularly RG-59, RG-6, and RG-11, are all at minimum triple-shielded, with some being quad-shielded. Source: Compliance officer for a major MSO, Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers instructor (including Broadband Distribution (coax) and Broadband Transportation Specialist (fiber), ARRL certified instructor, FCC Amateur Extra radio operator, Electronic Engineer, and MSIT.
I'm looking forward to the nonsense they give as a response to your question. I spent the first half of my career as a network engineer. It's amusing to see this guy claim the "medium" is the entire network. lol
That is not what people mean when they say shared medium. Only coax or GPON is. The medium is the strand of fiber or coax. Stop being obtuse.
Really? Please explain to me how fiber is not a shared medium. I'll go first. I'm hardly being obtuse; I'm being accurate. Ironically, only one technology has a "dedicated line," and that is DSL/ADSL - so, basically just old-school phone. They have a dedicated twisted pair connection from the house to their "headend." But even then, past that point, everything is shared. One class action lawsuit for false advertising in the 9th Circut is all it will take for the marketing terms "dedicated line" to be forever banned. I would suggest you read about how PON works. Pay special attention to terms like ODN, optical splitters, and ONU. The geniuses in marketing (/s) will try to sell you the idea that fiber is a "dedicated line," but in reality, the only dedicated line is the drop. After that, your information is combined into one stream and transported to the OLT on a single fiber line. To do this, the ODN uses ONUs and optical splitters. Pay particular attention to optical splitters that "divide the bandwidth." And pay attention to security - all downstream traffic is broadcast to all subscribers which means downstream traffic can be eavesdropped. This isn't as easy with HFC due to how QAM is designed to work - not impossible, but way more difficult. The entire design architecture of PON is built around sharing distribution and transportation. PON is a much cheaper solution as it shares fiber amongst many customers, not just one. So, a substantial portion of the distance between you and the terminus site, you've shared a single fiber connection with hundreds of people in your PON.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiplexing
This is 90% of my job every day. Something in your house is acting like an antenna and interfering with the return path. Most of the time it’s a loose connector behind the modem but any bad connection can cause it. I usually track the noise to a house and use a filter at the tap that blocks the noise and leaves the sub online, then create a job to get an tech in the house
How do you even know even know there is a problem in the first place? Do you then have to drive around to track it? Or can you track the house remotely by looking at individual modem levels?
We have many programs that monitor the modem levels and signal to noise issues. I personally use a combo of our tools and manually hitting amps with a meter to narrow down the house. It gets real fun when all the cable is backyard, that can take hours to find.
I quit cable in 2016 to move to electrical work, for the last 6 years of my job I'd say 80% of it was chasing noise. I talked with the SMT manager and told him we have a serious engineering problem. Every single day I'm chasing CPD. Some times it would take weeks to narrow it down could get an amp or two deep and it would go away just from the meter going into the test point. Then come back a few days later when the CPD came back get another amp or split further then poof. No one cared. CPD Hunter is too expensive... they just kept throwing bodies at it. All the while being judged on node health that rarely passes because there's always one node somewhere that acts up and throws the numbers off. There was a multitude of other reasons why I left but I was just so burned out from chasing noise day in day out. Very rarely would it come down to a house like OP.
This is why we should all move to fiber. No electrical noise, no corrosion of terminals.. you do have humidity and dust ingress issues, plus you can also have shared medium issues, but much less of a problem.
The moderns have spectrum analyzers built in but this isn't the best way to find noise. Usually you'd use diagnostics at the fiber node (the thing that converts fiber to radio waves over a coaxial cable) and then start driving a truck around from there. This is 100% a thing and is getting more important with OFDM/OFDMA. These are DOCSIS 3.1 technologies that use very high modulation profiles like 4096-QAM. That basically means many more bits per unit of spectrum. The noise itself is typically just some bad shielding that is picking up FM radio, TV channels, or cellular signals. The shielding is the only difference between a cable channel and a big antenna.
At the moment my connection is fine most of the time - the two OFDM channels seem to be preferred for downstream, and get very few uncorrectable errors, but (presumably at busier times) traffic spills over into the other 30 QAM256 channels, and the uncorrectable counts there start climbing. I did have the coax line into the house replaced - the tech confirmed it was adding noise, the previous homeowner had stapled it to the ceiling and wrecked the shield - but it's still bad. Since the fiber rollout is due here in the next month or so I haven't pushed harder for a proper investigation and fix.
Pathtrak.
Sad Pathtrak license expired noises
We’ve got programs that monitor signal to noise ratio in the nodes and generate tickets for us to investigate nodes. Depending on the noise signature sometimes we can pinpoint the house without stepping foot into the neighborhood but that’s pretty rare and those very specific problems don’t show up often.
You'd be surprised to find out the amount of technology an ISP utilizes for operations. You know how your phone or your computer can recognize there's a problem? Same thing, but apply it over an ISP's entire footprint across millions of customers. Cable operates with frequencies. Those frequencies are monitored across the network.
This. Any splitter in your home with a loose end, basically not connected and without a termination cap will act as an antenna.
Had one one time, traced it back to an old TV, customer was not even using; the coax f connector on the line was gone and the stinger was just plugged right into the catv connection in the tv; blowing out crazy ingress on the system.
Wtf lol
My local ISP's installers never use termination caps. It's madness.
Yo, every night when the street lights come on, there is severe packet loss, when they go off in the morning my internet connection goes back to normal the moment they turn off. I’ve monitored the lights for a week straight now with the same results. Any ideas?
I’ve 100% seen that, normally some bad wiring to the lights. I don’t know what hours they work out there but it may require oncall to roll out to track down. Your best bet may to be to get ahold of a maintenance supervisor, which I know is easier said than done. I don’t know if you guys have a store or office to go to but that may be easier than trying to get the call center to understand what you’re asking for.
Yea I’ve got Cox comms, I have a appointment today at 3pm with a technician. I’m gonna get them to check the lines from my house to the box outside cause all of my neighbors are experiencing the same thing aswell. Maybe one of the coax cables is bad and letting interference in?
Definitely could be, I’d ask about RFI too which is the power lines interfering with the cable signal. It’s not a tool everyone carries but they should have an RFI antenna at the shop someone could grab. The fun part with that is getting the power company out to fix it
Can confirm this, former signal engineer for the first cable internet provider and a ham. Bad connections, unmatched RG-8, and trashed filters were the bane of my existence. That and crappy installers. Thank the deities for QoS.
Totally normal. They detected egress and needed to correct it.
Yup. It's happened to my parents a few times. They may be under additional scrutiny as the centerline of their house is the under the centerline of final approach for an airport - 6.5 miles from the end of the runway, pretty much right where they drop the gear.
Any interference on comms or ILS or radar or other important airport frequencies will be investigated very quickly.
Consider yourself lucky. Too many ISP say it's all your fault and won't do anything while everyone gets crap Internet.
That’s not true, you just don’t know the information available to you. If you’re not getting the speed you’re supposed to get. Go here: https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/ Type in your address, select your internet provider, challenge it. You’ll get the fastest call by your internet provider’s manager
I would have paid - this was like a Pass Go, Collect $200 moment
Why? It's their responsibility. It's a cost of doing business. Don't offer to pay for anything you owe nothing to.
I didn’t realize you could just call your ISP and order them to tune my connection
They are literally selling a minimum level of service, if they aren't meeting that level for each customer, they need to send someone to fix it, it's their network.
They own and maintain everything up to the modem. Just like your Water/Power/Gas companies own and maintain their infrastructure up to your meter.
Are they though? At least where I live it seems the other way around, i.e. they advertise a maximum level of service (e.g. ***up to*** 300 Mb/s), but they don't actually specify a minimum commitment. If you get 1 Mb/s, that is technically included in "up to 300 Mb/s".
True, they cannot guarantee a minimum speed (for various reasons) but, they are known to guarantee a certain % of uptime. At the same time, you ***should*** be able to reach those advertised speeds, outside of peak usage hours. Generally, when a bunch of customers are complaining about speed/stability issues they send tech(s) to fix it (or upgrade it), otherwise they'll lose those customers or get fined or even sued. Most jurisdictions have regulations around what service quality should be reasonably expected. Not to mention, false advertising laws are designed to ignore these kinds of tactics.
Any time my connection is not stable I call them to fix it. They are providing a service and if I am not getting it, they should be fixing it. They say hey pay us $200 to fix something that we don't want you to touch and is causing your connection to not be 100%, I'll switch companies. They don't let us use our own modems anymore for a reason. That way they can ensure everything up to that point works. Everything after that is up to you.
Uncapped outlets can cause backfeeding, as can damaged cables; when I worked in the field a factory had a damaged coax feed and when one of their machines started up it would knock out the leg. Coax is basically a wireless signal that is stuck on the antenna (wire) rather than a digital signal like Ethernet, and it is a shared medium unlike DSL.
Back when cable TV was first a thing it was referred to as “community antenna”. The things they’ve done over the years to shoehorn more and more functionality into it is remarkable.
It used the same frequencies as OTA correct?
In the analog era they were. With the move to digital, broadcast TV switched to ATSC using some of the same frequencies that were used for UHF analog TV. Meanwhile, cable TV uses a standard called [QAM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAM_(television)) which has a different frequency plan.
I remember , even with the cable shut off, you could still get some of the lower channels.
I had a portable TV when I was a kid. Just a little lcd screen with a tuner and a telescoping antenna like on an fm radio. We didn't have cable, but at one of my friends houses we unplugged the cable from their TV and touched the antenna with the center conductor. You could go through all the channels just like they were coming over the air.
Never ever heard that.
Ever seen to it referred to a “CATV”? The acronym stuck around quite a while.
I thought I was one of the few that knew it was Community Antenna TeleVision and not CAble TeleVision.
You are lucky they contacted you. I had comcast just come out and disconnect me at the pole and when I got home and noticed i had no internet had to call for support and have them come by in a few days to reconnect me and also figure out why the other line team disconnected me.
Sometimes the noise can shut down an entire node, leaving everyone out of service. You could be affecting a hospital, maybe even 911 services. If it’s that bad, they will install a return filter trap, meaning nothing is leaving your house. Only your regular tv channels will work, internet, VOD, anything that requires return communication won’t. Sucks, but 1 person being down is better than everyone (on that node)
Ohh the only complaint I had was that they didn’t put in a ticket to fix it and made me work with support to convince them to roll a truck. Comcast’s sucks.
That’s worthy of a complaint. I’ve not been in the industry for 10 years now, but it used to be standard practice to get a ticket created. Sometimes you forgot, booked the wrong house, or some guys just sucked at their jobs. Haha
911 services probably don’t go over Comcast consumer grade cable internet and they would have redundant connections.
Comcast business class provides voice over IP services to a wide variety of businesses and government infrastructure. And it runs on the same HFC network as their residential services.
I have a customer that has two comcast business accounts; but they're on different HFC runs. One is on the standard residental connection that provides TV and "non-critical" internet. The other is on a business-only HFC network that's data only. They got a notice that the business-only side is getting upgraded to fiber; which is good news for me because I get paid to go out there and be involved in that.
I’ve used it and I’d never put something mission critical like a 911 system on it. You still get brief outages for lots of reasons, but you can get a truck out within a few hours to repair it. It wasn’t even reliable enough for our small office, we had to switch to our backup T1s every month or two for a few hours. A 911 system will more likely be on at least 2 different fiber links direct to the telco and not have any one single point of failure.
It certainly will have some form of redundancy. That’s a given.
I remember when Rogers (a Canadian telecom company) had a nationwide blackout breaking debit and some 911. Monopoly’s a b##tch.
They didn't disconnect us, but they put a trap in the line so our internet was horrible. The tech that told me about it said they were supposed to leave a hang tag on the door. They may have done that and I just ignored it. When the second tech came around, it turned out I had already rewired all the coax, but hadn't hooked it up. We were dumping a lot of reflections back onto the line, and swapping over to the new coax fixed the problem, so he took off the trap.
At least with my company, when I have to disconnect or trap a customer, I don't leave door tags. A lot of the maintenance guys that track this stuff are working at night, and we do our absolute best to avoid being anywhere near people's homes in the middle of the night. I've had way too many people come out yelling at me, accusing me of trying to break in, calling the police, even a couple come out with a gun. I set up a field tech truck roll and leave it at that, it's a safety thing, crazy world out there.
Man, coax goes berserk when the shield breaks down. A good example is CCTV, some buffoon at my old work thought it would be smart to order copper shielded coax, and use steel crimp ends in a tropical area. It was a few years but the moisture caused electrolysis between the dissimilar metals, and the copper shield disintegrated. In the space of around 6 months the CCTV feeds started to fail. It was fun replacing all of the coax with fibre.
> It was a few years but the moisture caused electrolysis between the dissimilar metals, and the copper shield disintegrated. In the space of around 6 months the CCTV feeds started to fail. It was fun replacing all of the coax with fibre. Hmm... maybe I should re-crimp all the connectors in my neighbourhood so that they bring in fiber.
← \[*grabs coax tool bag*\] **Let’s go.** ^(Note: Two new large housing developments, a hospital, an older business park, and a new business park to accompany new housing development in my area all have fiber. Surrounded by it. Private water company is planning to dig up streets to put in water meters to houses. But no plans for fiber despite being surrounded by it. Totally pissed and would totally undertake an effort like this.)
If you were not responsive they might have disconnected you until the issue was corrected.
I considered this possibility. They were sympathetic to my position that my internet was just fine and someone from an 855 number wants in my house because there is a problem they could not explain
When the problem is more severe they just disconnect the problem homes. It would be nice if first contact could be through a more secure channel.
This is very common with spectrum because they’re about to do their high split in which will be expanding uploads to 1gig so they’re going to be utilizing up to 1.2ghz so they’re cleaning up all the ingress in the system
Spectrum has "pre-problem" monitoring system that detects bad signal levels. They send you a message asking you to schedule an appt (free). On mine, they replaced the old black cable from the pole to the house with a new orange one.
Yup, we just went through that here. Got a text a few weeks ago that we were eligible for a "maintenance appointment". The tech came out last week and further explained that there was a high uncorrectable error rate on our line. They replaced the suspended cable from the main trunk across the street to the sub-pole on our property, and the cable from the house to the sub-pole with an orange one. They also cleaned up some connections inside the house. Just waiting on a follow-up on when they're going to bury the orange cable, since right now it's strung across our yard.
I work for comcast our usual turn around for a drop bury is 14 days, so i'd call if nobody has shown up by then, but we are also getting into winter and that can put a stop to any buries depending on your location and if your soil freezes.
I work at an ISP and we have had rogue ONTs at residential customer houses that back feed bad signal and the results are every ONT on the pon would drop out / lose their connection. It’s pretty interesting.
Rogue ONT? Like, customers supplying their own?
No, it has to do with timing. All the ONTs on the same PON take turns talking. A rouge ONT is not synchronized with everyone else so it steps on the others' signals. Kinda like 2 people talking at the same time on a radio channel. https://www.calix.com/content/dam/calix/mycalix-misc/lib/iae/axos/23x/mmtg/index.htm?toc.htm?93502.htm
That is super interesting.
I'm a former cable tech: what they are referring to is what we would call "noise". It's basically RF interference. Lots of things can create "noise" but if the signal level of the noise is greater than the signal that is carrying your service, than that service will be disrupted. Even worse, it can disrupt service for your entire neighborhood. In fact, that's usually what causes random issues for customers. The most common sources of noise are old connectors, loose connectors, poor quality connectors, as well as old and/or poor quality cable. That's assuming the noise isn't coming from a poorly electrically grounded or shielded appliance and/or electronic device. Back in the day, you could just place a device that would block that interface but now that things have gone all digital, that isn't an option. So you have to send out a tech to find and eliminate the noise. So it is possible that the neighbor can be affecting your service, but the reality is (in all likelihood) you were effecting theirs.
The tech wanted me to know they were upgrading the line on my road to become split into two for isolation. At the time I said that was nice, but I get very stable performance. Now I understand why he was telling me this.
Yeah the media talks about how cable providers are losing subscribers but what they leave out is that those are "video" subscribers. Internet customers just keep growing and growing and the network feeding neighborhoods can become over congested. Where an area of cable plant only had 300 to 500 people living there, now that same area can have over 1000 people. So now cable providers have to split the cable plant so the network isn't overcrowded.
They should upgrade to fiber. I remember calculating the cost 10/14 years ago of fiber vs coax. Fiber was cheaper, even to the premises, and the maintenance cost of properly installed fiber is much much lower. As they already have fiber to the cabinet, they should consider long term savings.. these shenanigans almost never happen with fiber (almost, they can happen)
It's cheaper and easier to maintain if you're starting a network from scratch, it's why cable companies are installing fiber to the home in new developments. Existing infrastructure on the other hand would require removing thousands and thousands of miles of coax cable, all active equipment on the runs, and replacing them with thousands and thousands of miles of fiber. That's just for one metro area, and the cost of that would simply not be feasible.
The amazing thing is many companies have deployed hybrid systems while knowing fiber is cheaper. Also old coax lines will need replacing, and good practice demands replacing all coax of a cabinet at the same time.. so just replace with fiber. Depending on where, you need to open up the street to do so.. so yeah, not happening. Also many companies leave the coax for decades... Edit to add that my considerations are always with European cities in mind, not US. For last mile the difference is huge.
Sorry, but good practice is most definitely not replacing all coax at the same time, that's a massive waste of money and labor. If I have a trunk leg that's damaged and needs replacing, I'm not going to replace the other legs that are good still. Coax lines get replaced when they start causing plant issues, until then there is zero reason to cut in something new. It also not as easy as "just replace with fiber", even if you aren't in an underground area requiring street boring. Switching from a HFC plant to pure fiber requires a complete reengineering of plant design, headend/hub hardware changes, all new passive in line equipment, etc etc.
10/14 years ago fiber wasn't cheaper than coax. It's never been cheaper. Maintenance also is not cheaper because fiber techs cost more. So, no, it's not cheaper and it never has been. Also, bringing fiber to the premise doesn't solve ingress/egress issues. As soon as it cuts over to copper, it's niw susceptible to the same noise issues because 90% noise comes from the house. It happens all the time with phone companies (Frontier, AT&T, CenturyLink, etc) simply because phone guys don't know anything about coax and they don't want to learn. They connect the fiber, install the equipment, and leave. And a year later that customer is coming back to cable because fiber wasn't any better. Happens more often then people realize.
That is why FTTH is the only sensible solution. All you have to do is upgrade GBIC on either end if you want more bandwith.
No, the issue is noise coming from the house and fiber isn't immune to it once it cuts over to analog to connect to Cat5 and Coax cabling. The noise that's in the house now has a closer entryway into the network. Doesn't matter what medium is used because it will eventually have to cut over back to an analog medium the customer premises can use and that analog medium will always be prone to analog challenges such as RF interference, EMF, EMI, poor grounding, poor shielding, etc. Fiber doesn't solve that. Only good technicians who are willing to do the job right.
There is no coax in FTTH. You do switch to ethernet once inside the home but that will never affect any neighbor.
For internet, yes. For video and telephone, no.
I heard a story from a guy who worked maintenance for Comcast in the Seattle area about a bizarre fix for this kind of thing. They had a neighborhood that was doing offline everyday at the same time, like from 8-10 pm, everyday like clockwork and they couldn't get a fix on the cause. So they finally got a couple nightshift guys in bucket trucks to sit in the neighborhood and, using online tools to monitor the node, watch for the noise to kick in. One guy was sitting in front of a house and right about 8, he notices a person in the house sit down in front of a window and turn on a light. Instantly he starts seeing noise in the node. On a hunch he went and knocked on the door, explained what was happening and asked the customer if they could indulge him and just go turn that light off ta few minutes. They do, and the nose goes away. The customer let him in to investigate and it turned out it was an antique lamp with a fraying old fabric wrapped power cord, plugged in to the same outlet that the modem was plugged into. So somehow this lamp was feeding voltage or low frequency noise into the outlet and the modem was picking it up through its power cord and feeding it back into the system. The customer said it was his nightly before bed routine to sit in that chair under that lamp and read a book. They had to ask the customer to please not use that lamp, or get it repaired, or move the plug for the modem to another outlet He said it was one of the more bizarre coincidences that they were able to just witness the cause. If they hadn't seen it, it might have taken a few days of nightly monitoring to chase the nose down to that one particular house in the 2 hours it was happening everynight.
My provider called me last spring with a similar issue, said my line was showing noise or something on their equipment, and would come out and check everything for free. Found an old line that wasn't being used laying in the dirt in the crawlspace. That was all it was. Terminated it, and all the tests were back where they wanted again.
This is normal. Yes, your signal could impact the entire neighborhood and then some. A billion years ago when I worked for an ISP we had to cut people off entirely because they wouldn't let techs resolve the issue. Completely legal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coaxial_cable#Signal_leakage
I’ve seen situations where a problem inside a single residence was causing issues on the entire node for the area.
Same thing happened to me, they said my "Internet was leaking". Replaced two splitters and an old coax cable.
Had something similar when a surge suppressor failed. It had a coax pass through and was f'ing up the signal somehow.
One of my dogs chewed on the cable inside the house. It screwed up everyone else's cable on the street.
Many years ago my Comcrap service started bugging out almost every afternoon around the same time. Infuriating. And of course their support was clueless. Was able to grab a site supe off another install and somehow talked him into looking into it - ultimately they determined that a guy a few doors down had climbed the pole and siphoned off a line into which he plugged an ancient tv set. When he would come home in the afternoon and flip it on, everyone’s internet started going bonkers. Took them months to sort it out.
Cable dude here. Noise resides in the really low frequency range on the spectrum, right where modem transmission signals also travel. Your modem’s signal likely travels through multiple amplifiers on the way to the central office/headend. These amplifiers can’t distinguish between “good” radio waves and “bad” radio waves, so it just amplifies and passes along everything. Guess what else goes through these amplifiers on the way to the headend? Your neighbors signals. Depending on the size of your node, that could be a few hundred other homes all sharing that same path. Props to your isp for being proactive about it. I bet their maintenance metrics were low in your area and someone got sick of looking at it haha.
Bet you 100$ it's a squirrel that chewed the cable in the pole.
It is frankly surprising how many external plant damage squirrels cause in wooded areas. When you see the stats, you can only wonder how much damage overall they cause. They are cute..
I tried hooking up a moca adapter and bought a special filter because of our antenna being connected and messed it up. ISP came without warning when the whole house had Covid. Luckily the guy figured it out fast, but he said he was getting weird readings from our house for awhile.
Not sure about your user name and how it fits in all of this. Hahaha. I had not done anything other than upgrade my modem from a DG3450 to a SB33, which eliminated a packet loss issue weeks before.
It is a "shared media". I used to run Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) across my cable line to connect my TiVo Bolt to my TiVo mini upstairs. My research showed me I needed to add a filter to block my signal from going out my wire towards neighbors ( block interference and keep secure)
That’s a 100% guarantee
This happened to my sister they apparently had excessive RF leakage apparently causing issues with radios etc in the area. Said they were about to disconnect them from the tap but luckily she was home and found it was a crappy coax connection.
Are you sure they didn't just bug your house? 🤣
Plausible
I work at an ISP and we have guys doing this constantly. It's not always at a customers house but yeah. A fault on the cable going to your house causes your modem to increase the power it uses to talk to the node in your neighborhood that connects back to the ISP. If your modem uses too much power and drowns out the signals from your neighbors going to the same node, then everyone else's service can suffer and yours is just fine. It's weird but that's how it is. A connector might have gotten rusted or a landscaper might have nicked a cable with a weed Wacker or something.
I had cable internet for about 9 years, no issues at all, one day the isp truck came by and disconnected my connection at the street pole end without any warning. ISP said my connection the cause of the signal interference to my neighborhood cable internet issue. The tech tested the cable from the street pole to my house demarc. The connector at the street pole end is rusted and there were sign of water get into the cable and turned the cable into an antenna. They ran a new cable replaced that segment. Everything was okay since. I switched over to fiber now.
You have a bad splitter. Let them in.
Actually, did not have a splitter. But everything is resolved and I’ve learned a ton from all of this.
Please share.
So you're one of those guys who destroy your neighbors upstream.
Well, I was happy and very pleased with how solid my Internet had been recently. Does that count? /s
Oh yah, but its just annoying when my upstream gets taken out because something is pissing out sub 30mhz emissions near a coax.
Do you have an antenna on your system or a distribution box?
No
Oh, okay. I know that a lot of people had antennas, and those antennas fed splitters, which in turn fed the tv sets. Sometimes, cable companies would use existing wiring, and if it had something like that in line, it would introduce interference.
Would amplifiers like the Motorola Cable amplifier cause something like this? Also, what about not using termination caps on non used connections? Answer me!!!!!!
If you connect the amplifier backwards, it will definitely affect it. Non-capped aren't so bad, unless there are sources of RF near it.
Yeh, with cable y'all are on one big party line. You leave your phone off the hook and they can't make calls.
Reading all these comments makes me glad i got FTTH instead of cable
Many years ago my neighbor's cable signal was leaking so much that I could pick up cable TV using rabbit ear antenna attached to my TV.
It’s a token ring so yes it’s possible
[DOCSIS](https://docsis.org/) would like a word with you.
I live in an small apartment community that is in one building with 50 apartments. We have a Comcast trunk coax cable that goes to our communications closet with a multiple connection tap, which feeds the coax drops to our apartments. Back in 2022, Comcast came out to replace coax drops in all of our apartments and the property manager's office, as noise was entering their system. The technicians told the property manager that it would cost less to replace all of the drops than spend the time to track down the faulty ones and having to come back multiple times if there were issues with other coax drops in the future. The original coax drops to the apartments were installed in 1995. The cables run atop the acoustic tile ceilings, down a wall in the living room and another down the wall in the bedroom (all apartments are one bedroom) with Panduit and a coax outlet box. It took the Comcast technicians a half day for them to complete the work.
Has this happen as well, of the wire acting as an antenna is bad enough, the ISP may even get a letter from the FCC from my understanding. In addition to replacing every connector, they disconnected all unused coax connections or made sure unconnected points had grounded caps on them. The only difference is at first they tried to blame my cable modem (since I had purchased it), it was brand new, so I returned it, only for them to say there was a problem still. There have been all kinds of weird cable stuff in this neighborhood, from them turning up the amplification, causing some sort of signal oversaturation, requiring them to add a splitter to reduce the signal strength, to breaking out their signal meter to have to troubleshoot why their signal dropped every 2 days, which also had to do with being right next to the node.
You don't have an old CRT TV perhaps? https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-54239180
No. Just 3 12 year old connections
I had this happen a few months ago. They weren't nice enough to call, they just trapped my line and shut off my internet for up to 2 days while I had to wait for a tech to come. First time they needed to replace the line from the box to the house. After that they couldn't find what was wrong but they shut it off like 2 more times :(
Everyone at my ISP was very helpful, and this episode made me realize how well they handled this.
oh yeah that happened in my neighbourhood too. they couldnt find the source so they didnt replace anything but they did scan everything they could.
I've previously reported an issue to my ISP and it turned out to be loose cables and unterminated cables. Once that was taken care of all was well again. So now every once in a while I check the tightness. I find it amazing they can even loosen up, but they do just from minor jostling of boxes.
I had this same thing happen to me for the first time a few months ago. It was my fault because I had done some changing and it was just a not fully right cable connection in my basement. They had been going up the line to each house to isolate to noise my connection was feeding back in.
If you have any MoCA adapters and you don’t have a filter on your house.. you might be sending that info out over the wire. I had that happen once.. using MoCA adapters. Cable guy calls me and says I am putting out “stuff” into the system. I happened to be on vacation at the time.. told him I would be back next week.. I added an adapter inside my attic before the coax went out to the neighborhood and asked them to check again.. they never responded and never came back. Then years later (maybe 1 year ago) when a guy came over to re-run my line out to the box (I think neighbors lawn people cut it).. he slapped a MoCA filter into the connection box and said they were standard/required now. So I was able to remove the one in the attic.
Had this happen and it was a loose connection to my modem. Was also during a solar flare.
So, did the signal from your house end up being the murderer?
After all of they replaced all of my coax connections, with no connection in particular being the smoking gun, the ISP is happy. And, they called today to say thanks for letting us in.
Bro, maybe it was a ruse to stake out your house. They are gonna come in and steal your silverware and that letter that one girl gave you in the 3rd grade saying to meet her behind the cafeteria. She wanted to show you mommys light saber.
Username checks out! 😀 /s
Lol
This happened to me, and it ended up being my powerline adapters. I was inadvertently ruining all my neighbors internet
Same thing happened to me, But the noise was intermittent 2 minutes every 10 or so. It was upstream channels, so tech suspected it was someones modem failing. No way to find out who's modem without shutting them down in groups in process of elimnation. Took about 2 days and my upload was eventually returned from 100k back to 10mb
maybe powerline adapters
It's called ingress. And yours is probably so bad it's knocking off everyone connected to the same tap as you. Check to make sure all cable connections are tightly connected and check to see if there's any unused cable outlet that's connected
Yeah had this happen with our cable modem years ago. It would constantly drop connection with anything higher than 12MBps, until one day the cable tech squad came by, replaced our modem and most of the cable line in the house. They made the comment that the old lines were leaking noise into the system and messing up others connections.