Comment by liotier
2 years ago
A customer's DSL connection dysfunctioned every evening during December - but worked fine the rest of the year... Culprit: interference from nearby Christmas decorations leaking EM all over the place.
A customer's DSL connection dysfunction's frequency increased mornings and evenings. Culprit: the lift's electric motor leaking EM all over the place.
A bunch of DSL connections degrade when traffic increase... Crosstalk in big cables of course !
The sort of fun incidents that take a good while to troubleshoot... I'm glad we are migrating away from DSL to fiber: either it works or not !
It's not like fiber doesn't have its own weird failure modes. Favourite one I heard was shoddy belowground work while crossing a street. No problem with ordinary car traffic, but heavy trash haul trucks could interrupt the link.
An ISP my friend worked at was having weird outages in one area, and it turned out that they had an apartment block built right in the way of their free-space optical link. Surprisingly, it was fine at first because the link went straight through it without obstructions, window to window. But when they started to add window panes, finishing the construction, the link became spotty, and adding the doors blocked the signal completely.
How does one even attempt to troubleshoot that, without resorting to a questionably legal drone or chopper flight?!
1 reply →