<story><title>Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-54239180</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ethanwillis</author><text>I recently had my own host of cable internet issues.&lt;p&gt;So about 3 months ago the RJ45 cable in my cable modem &lt;i&gt;melted&lt;/i&gt;. I thought it was a freak accident. I checked all of my networking equipment, checked my outlets, etc. No problems. So I installed a new cable and then everything was fine.&lt;p&gt;Cue 2 weeks ago. Connectivity became intermittent and then finally I had no internet for almost a week. Comcast wouldn&amp;#x27;t be able to send anyone out for a month. So I started digging around for the problem. A little over a year ago they sent out techs to work on my neighbors internet and in the process foolishly &lt;i&gt;cut&lt;/i&gt; my coax. So I started from the cable tap and worked my way backwards.&lt;p&gt;There wasn&amp;#x27;t a continuity problem from what I could tell, no one either intentionally or unintentionally cut the cable. Then I look on the back of my house where the coax from the street is bonded to my home&amp;#x27;s grounding rod. Everything to the right of the bond was completely melted and still super hot. NOT GOOD.&lt;p&gt;So I did some testing of the bonding wire to the ground, the resistance was 37 ohms (should be much less than this). And there were no other electrical problems. My thought at the time was somehow power was being backfed from the cable tap to my home. So I removed the cable from the street and disconnected everything inside that was touch this cable.&lt;p&gt;Almost immediately I start getting voltage drops in my house, can&amp;#x27;t even run the microwave. That&amp;#x27;s when I realized what was &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; going on. The cable line was being used as a return path because the neutral for my neighborhood was at least partially severed.&lt;p&gt;It was so bad that if I increased voltage load in my home past a certain point then the streetlights in the front of my home would completely turn off.. Yes I could turn city infrastructure off and on by toggling the voltage load in my home.&lt;p&gt;The power company within a few hours had a crew come out to diagnose and fix the issue since it&amp;#x27;s actually potentially dangerous. They confirmed for me it was indeed a bad neutral. As soon as they replaced it I spliced my coax line, reconnected it, and everything worked perfectly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mnw21cam</author><text>A few years back, when we had a load of wet weather, we had a power cut. It lasted about an hour before the power came back on again, only to go off after about 30 seconds. This time it was off for about 5 minutes, then back on for 30 seconds again.&lt;p&gt;On a whim, I wandered down the road. It had stopped raining. About 50m down the road there was a dry patch of pavement and a smell of burning plastic. Another 100m down the road was the electricity substation, with a guy from the electric company who said he was trying yet another 300A fuse. He said that often the cable can be shorted out by ground water, but connecting it up again may heat it enough to drive the water out and make it fine. I asked him after breaking three fuses already, how he thought another one would solve the problem, and would he like to know where the short was? Took a bit of persuading to get him to walk 100m up the road to where the dry patch and smell of burning plastic was, and of course by then the smell had worn off a bit. Another electric company guy arrived with a smelling device, which they bashed into the tarmac to try to identify the location of the break, eventually settling with exactly where I told them it was.&lt;p&gt;Within a couple of hours after that, a team had ripped up the pavement, dug down to the cable, spliced it, wrapped it up in waterproofing, refilled the hole, and relaid the pavement.&lt;p&gt;But I think your story wins.</text></comment>
<story><title>Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-54239180</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ethanwillis</author><text>I recently had my own host of cable internet issues.&lt;p&gt;So about 3 months ago the RJ45 cable in my cable modem &lt;i&gt;melted&lt;/i&gt;. I thought it was a freak accident. I checked all of my networking equipment, checked my outlets, etc. No problems. So I installed a new cable and then everything was fine.&lt;p&gt;Cue 2 weeks ago. Connectivity became intermittent and then finally I had no internet for almost a week. Comcast wouldn&amp;#x27;t be able to send anyone out for a month. So I started digging around for the problem. A little over a year ago they sent out techs to work on my neighbors internet and in the process foolishly &lt;i&gt;cut&lt;/i&gt; my coax. So I started from the cable tap and worked my way backwards.&lt;p&gt;There wasn&amp;#x27;t a continuity problem from what I could tell, no one either intentionally or unintentionally cut the cable. Then I look on the back of my house where the coax from the street is bonded to my home&amp;#x27;s grounding rod. Everything to the right of the bond was completely melted and still super hot. NOT GOOD.&lt;p&gt;So I did some testing of the bonding wire to the ground, the resistance was 37 ohms (should be much less than this). And there were no other electrical problems. My thought at the time was somehow power was being backfed from the cable tap to my home. So I removed the cable from the street and disconnected everything inside that was touch this cable.&lt;p&gt;Almost immediately I start getting voltage drops in my house, can&amp;#x27;t even run the microwave. That&amp;#x27;s when I realized what was &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; going on. The cable line was being used as a return path because the neutral for my neighborhood was at least partially severed.&lt;p&gt;It was so bad that if I increased voltage load in my home past a certain point then the streetlights in the front of my home would completely turn off.. Yes I could turn city infrastructure off and on by toggling the voltage load in my home.&lt;p&gt;The power company within a few hours had a crew come out to diagnose and fix the issue since it&amp;#x27;s actually potentially dangerous. They confirmed for me it was indeed a bad neutral. As soon as they replaced it I spliced my coax line, reconnected it, and everything worked perfectly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smichel17</author><text>Just FYI, I really enjoyed your story but I &lt;i&gt;almost&lt;/i&gt; closed the tab and didn&amp;#x27;t read it due to &amp;quot;Read on to find out&amp;quot; in the first paragraph. It sets off all the clickbait alarms in my head, which make me expect to find a bunch of low-quality content. The rj45 cable melting is just as good of a hook (and is actually why I continued reading). I&amp;#x27;d suggest sticking the first sentence onto the front of the second paragraph and removing the rest of the first paragraph.</text></comment>