Hot Weather Dropout

[YorkshireGamer]

Once again summer has rolled round and as soon as it gets warm the internet for our street drops out. My hub is in a nice shaded cool location so it isn't that and rebooting it makes no difference. Today I had no internet from 1pm til 8pm then it magically comes back once it's cooled down outside. Previous 2 days it's been 4pm til 8pm. Either the cabinet at the end of our street is overheating or just general national infrastructure can't cope either way it's frustrating and stopping me from being able to work. No error message ever comes up on the status page but it's impacting multiple addresses on our street so it's not a in premises issue. Previously all they did was send an engineer to come and replace the hub which made no difference as it had cooled down weather wise by then so was working anyway.

[Sephiroth]

It may be that the fans in the optical node (one of the larger street cabinets in your locality) have failed and it's all going wonky there.

That said, the excessive heat can affect any ancient cabinet and its passive components.

[manytentacles]

Totally the same in my area. As soon as it gets hot the upload drops to about 0.01 and the yellow light starts flashing. Loads of T2 errors on the upstream, and some lead to T3.

Come the morning it's all back and working fine. We had a technician yesterday who changed the hub (which was fine as it was a Hub 4) and that the readings to the cab were fine. He went to check but he couldn't get in the cabinet because he didn't have a key that worked (said he'd not seen the lock that was on it).

I contacted VM and their chat person was terrible. They said it needed a cable repull and we'd have to wait until the 18th. I explained that we'd had someone over and what they said, but they were insistent there was nothing wrong and it is a cabling issue.

Anyways, it's all fine now and is supposed to be cooler today. We'll see what happens.

[manytentacles]

I'm a browser of these forums recently and it's always nice to see replies from yourself. After my interaction with the chat people from VM it's good to see someone with technical knowledge!

[Sephiroth]

... thanks for the compliment.  There are a few of us on this Forum.  Wouldn't it be good if the VM bods were able to take our published knowledge into account.  Their scripts are based on useless premises.

[Roger_Gooner]

I would like to think that the optical node cabinets have temperature sensors that trigger an alarm if temperatures exceed certain thresholds. I do accept that some are well over 30 years old, though, and were built to a budget by VM's predecessors.

[YorkshireGamer]

Sure enough cooler weekend all held up fine. Got slightly warmer today and it's all fallen over again and back to no internet for probably 6 hours. But none of this counts enough to be an outage that is eligible for compensation as it's not down for 2 days continually. But I effectively lose the internet for most of the day and well into the evening anytime the temperature is above 24 degrees

[Vikki_M]

Hi YorkshireGamer

Thanks for your post and welcome to our community.

I'm sorry to hear about the service issues you're having.

I'll send you a private message now so I can take a closer look at what's happening.

Please look out for the envelope in the top right of the page and pop back to me when you can. 

[User666]

Getting the same in our area, Total loss of network is too high a bar for compensation. If i am having to use my 4G mobile phone connection rather than my wired Virgin one which is 4x the price, then the Virgin product is not fit for purpose.

[nodrogd]

Could be an overheating node, but these have cooling facilities. The slave cabinets that work off the nodes do not have any such facilities, as most are powered at low voltage from further upstream. Most of these cabs have vents to give some cooling to the distribution amplifier, but in high temps & direct sunlight the performance is affected. Also if you have a lot of exposed cable running round your house, or an omni-box with a splitter in that is in full sunlight this can cause problems with individual connections during hot weather.