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The Internet Australia Network Wireless Networking

NBN Replaces 10,000 Modems After Lightning 'Fries' Devices Across Blue Mountains (theguardian.com) 72

Posted by BeauHD from the technical-difficulties dept.
An anonymous reader writes: NBN Co has been forced to replace 10,000 faulty broadband devices in homes across the Blue Mountains west of Sydney after residents reported the technology was frequently struck by lightning and in one instance led to blue sparks flying out of a modem in a family's home. About 20,000 of the more than 32,000 homes in the Blue Mountains and Emu Plains have been connected to the national broadband network via fibre-to-the-curb (FttC) technology, which was set up under the Coalition government's multi-technology mixed model. That means fibre runs all the way to the edge of the property and connects to the home via the existing copper wire lead-ins from the curb.

Electrical storms in the Blue Mountains have wreaked havoc on the boxes that link the fibre to the copper. When lightning strikes the distribution boxes outside the house, sparks are sent flying up the copper lines, in turn frying the modems in people's homes. Guardian Australia understands the company has replaced 10,000 -- or half -- of devices inside the home that the company has identified as being prone to be affected by lightning. A spokesman for NBN Co confirmed that the company had found issues with the devices in areas of hard ground like sandstone. Sandstone is more resistant to electrical conduction than other soft earths. He said the devices fail in a safe way but the company nevertheless is issuing replacement devices people can install themselves. "We are now deploying a strengthened [device] that is much less likely to fail in these conditions.
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NBN Replaces 10,000 Modems After Lightning 'Fries' Devices Across Blue Mountains More

NBN Replaces 10,000 Modems After Lightning 'Fries' Devices Across Blue Mountains

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  • With the chip shortages and supply chain problems for everything from washing machines to fence staples, where are you going to get ten thousand modems on short notice? I don't imagine an ISP with 32,000 customers will have 10,000 modems sitting in their warehouse.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Entrope ( 68843 )

      NBN is Australia's National Broadband Network [wikipedia.org]. The 32,000 homes in those areas are far, far from the only users NBN supports.

    • The chip shortage is not universal. These shortages are specifically related to certain types of chips with certain node sizes. Just because an LCD driver chip is impossible to come by doesn't mean an FPGA in a cable modem is.

      In that regard I can't say I've heard of a shortage of NBN modems so I'm not sure if they are affected. My parents just had theirs replaced. Was done within a several days, and those days are typical of getting an ISP to actually bother to send out a replacement.

    • Given Australia's innovative fibre-over-copper design for the NBN, I'd say you can buy this stuff by the dumpster-load from other countries that have looked at it and rejected it.

  • Every time a thunderstorm rolls through, I get ready for the phone calls.

    Most of them I have to tell people to lodge a fault via their ISP, who relay the call to the NBN, who then send out a tech (likely from Telstra) with a new NTD or modem.

    Roll on Starlink.

  • I don't think the problem is with the modems or other "devices" connected to the lines. Rather, the problem is more likely caused by inadequate grounding of the outside lines, pole to pole, and especially where they enter the customers' homes.

    Lightning is a problem for anyone with wires in the air, and they must be grounded or have high-voltage discharge devices installed on them to reduce the risk of damage to the things that are connected to the wires. The reported "blue sparks" phenomenon is a sur

    • A spokesman for NBN Co confirmed that the company had found issues with the devices in areas of hard ground like sandstone. Sandstone is more resistant to electrical conduction than other soft earths.

      Although cutting the amount of copper between the fibre and the user would help.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

        Fibre into every home instead of an intermediate device on the pole outside the home of at some drop-off point would remove that problem entirely.

        If you have a final leg of copper then I see a "designed to fail" solution.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dwywit ( 1109409 )

      There's not much communications copper in the air in Australia. POTS (phone, ADSL, NBN) copper is mostly underground, although some areas have cable TV coax cohabiting with mains on power poles. The customers here aren't experiencing surge via coax, it's coming up the POTS twisted pair.

      The NBN system in Australia (sans fixed wireless and satellite) runs fibre from exchange to premises (FTTP, all underground), or fibre from exchange to curb (or kerb, FTTC), then POTS copper into premises (also all undergroun

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by jezwel ( 2451108 )

        The article said it was the FTTN cabinets being hit, then a surge travelling up the copper to the end users.

        No, the article says:

        When lightning strikes the distribution boxes outside the house...

        For FTTC that's the DPU in the pit on the footpath that typically services 4 premises (though I understand there are ones that can do up to 16).

        So it would seem that inadequate lightning/surge protection is the issue. The NBN Co failed to design and build a robust infrastructure. This is my shocked face.

        With you all the way on this. What's more depressing is how many DPUs are replaced annually:

        3% of the 437,000 boxes installed at the kerb are replaced every month

        So a third of the DPUs are replaced each year, and each of those jobs requires a technician out to replace the DPU and reconnect all the copper lines into it. The cost for the tech and hardware, plus the lost productivity of subscribers, the wasted hou

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dwywit ( 1109409 )

          Fair enough - I thought it would be more likely for an above-ground node to be hit, rather than an underground DPU.

          Although I suppose "hit" doesn't have to mean a direct hit.

          • Fair enough - I thought it would be more likely for an above-ground node to be hit, rather than an underground DPU.

            Although I suppose "hit" doesn't have to mean a direct hit.

            Interestingly, the "sandstone is more resistant to electrical conduction than other soft earths" factor probably increases the likelihood of damage caused by ground strikes that are even a fair distance from the affected equipment. Because the resistance of 'ground' is higher, the per-metre voltage gradient across the earth will also be higher; this causes a greater voltage differential between, say, the curbside box and the electrical panel ground at the premises. More conductive soil would cause the volta

            • The Blue Mountains are notorious for this issue. I used to work at two coal mines in the area. In one, electric motors just wouldn't run as there is no electrical earth whatsoever - the ground just didn't conduct electricity. They had to create an earth grid by inserting copper rods 200m into the ground to get past the insulating coal seams, and tie all electric gear into them. When there were lightning strikes, the lightning would travel along the rail lines, then jump over the ground to reach that earthin

        • Re:Grounding! (Score:5, Informative)

          by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @11:10PM (#61398884)

          Yeah. Pretty much the entire reason the origianl fibre to the home was dropped was because the LNP is ideologically committed to pissing on anything Labor does.. Their ideologiy is basically "Oh a progressive did this ,therefore its bad we need to kill it". And so they sabotaged the most important infrastructure project in a generation, purely to be smug assholes and and fuck up a labor project.

          How people don't vote them out with a vengence is beyond me. We're gonna be stuck. with this mess for decades and we didn't have to be.

          And yeah this exploding modem things a real issue. I've twice had to replace NBN modems, the most recent time I literally saw an electrical arc shoot across the room from the nodem. Scared the shit out of me.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by vlad30 ( 44644 )
            No it was dropped as the cost blowout and timeframes went through the roof the decision was made to initially use what was already there, the cable network for instance, and increase capacity with a view to upgrade to fibre when most people had adequate speed and access. Fibre equipment also had issues which needed ironing out and this was slowing installations which included training the installers. FYI many areas are getting the upgrade you can check on NBNco website

            https://www.nbnco.com.au/corporate-inf

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by jabuzz ( 182671 )

              Apart from the idiot polition (I forget his name) who suggested that upgrading from 100Mbps to 1Gbps was not possible/ridiculous.

              I am fed up with people who don't get that a piece of single mode fibre coming into your home is end game. There is *NOTHING* better coming along *EVER*. Sure we will be changing the optics on either end of the fibre but there will never be a wholesale replacement like there is from copper to fibre transition going on across the world at moment ever again.

              Excepting hollow core fib

              • There is *NOTHING* better coming along *EVER*.

                Depends on your requirements. More than 50% of internet users require mobile access. Fixed fibre is terrible at that, 5G is infinitely better.

            • Re:Grounding! (Score:4, Informative)

              by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2021 @06:57AM (#61399544)

              No it was dropped as the cost blowout and timeframes went through the roof

              Nope. The MTM was decided on before any cost blowout happened. It was 100% political and why the LNP was so heavily backed by Murdoch going into the election in the first place.

              The MTM was the LNP pretending to be the good guys, and in changing a project scope half way through actually directly caused a large part of the cost blowout (which anyone who has ever done project management can attest to and precisely why absolutely no one anywhere in the world builds a network from the ground up in this was, despite the LNP trying to tell Australia that's how Europe does it).

              Better still precisely the part of the network which was kept was the most expensive and least performant part. Telstra got a nice windfall from their cronies when their decrepit copper infrastructure was bought from them, infrastructure which everyone knew was falling apart (largely due to corrosion from past maintenance practices).

              Also screw you for trying to tell people they are getting an "upgrade". In most cases they aren't even getting what was promised originally.

              But hey at least my parents got a fancy new box. I mean their network speed hasn't changed, their tax dollars were wasted, and they are spending $25 / month more for internet for an identical speed service, but they should be happy right? Even if the costs did blow out at least they would have gotten something for their money.

              Oh one thing did change, the NBN goes down more than their ADSL2 line ever did.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by trawg ( 308495 )

                Out of mod points but would mod you up through the roof if I had some spare. Accurate summary of the shitfest that the NBN became. I don't know how but I have mates that were on rock solid Telstra HFC cable lines and once they got converted to NBN they became unreliable. I don't know enough about the hardware side to know what, if anything, changed, but it has been a huge pain for them.

                I've been lucky with my HFC NBN which was only recently deployed about a year ago.

          • And so they sabotaged the most important infrastructure project in a generation,

            Lol, the NBN is already obsolete. As predicted, 5G will kill most of it, and products like Starlink will kill the rest. The government has no place operating in commodity markets.

            How people don't vote them out with a vengence is beyond me

            Because something is beyond you doesn't make it wrong. The debacle that is the NBN was predicted hence why it was opposed.

        • A lot of the DPU replacing going on at the moment is replacing the original DPU's with ones that support G.fast, and will deliver up to 1gbps on FTTC. Sure I'd take fibre any day, but if FTTC is going to deliver me 1gbps as well as its delivering 100mbps now, which is pretty much flawlessly, I can't complain.

      • The NBN system in Australia (sans fixed wireless and satellite) runs fibre from exchange to premises (FTTP, all underground), or fibre from exchange to curb (or kerb, FTTC), then POTS copper into premises (also all underground), or fibre from exchange to a node - a green above ground cabinet in your street or nearby street, then POTS copper underground to your premises.

        That's just a subset. NBN uses other mixed technologies too, including HFC and Wireless.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dwywit ( 1109409 )

          OK, using "subset" is misleading. Fibre of one kind or another covers the majority of customers. And apart from FTTP, they're all a fibre hybrid of some sort.

    • Its fiber to the property line, I doubt the lightning is attracted to/running down the fiber...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ve3oat ( 884827 )
        Maybe so, but then *what* is attracting the lightning, so often and so strongly, to the lines coming into customers' homes? Simply dismissing fibre as the cause does not solve the problem. It seems there must be something peculiar about the hardware that NBN is using, that is causing this huge problem.

        • You know how all the old folks know not to use the telephone during a thunderstorm? The reason why [howstuffworks.com] hasn't changed just because it's a modem holding an electrically conductive copper wire in its "ear"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      They also mention "sandstone", which makes me think some of the installation "technicians" did not bother to drive the grounding spike in right and/or did not measure its impedance after that. Depending on the ground, a spike may also be insufficient.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

      That's what fried mine over a decade ago. When they came out to look at it they said - it's not grounded as it was supposed to be. They drove 3 - 8' copper rods in, about 1' apart cabled them together to the house ground and cable ground. No problems since.

      When it hit, it took out the cable modem, the DL-380 server that it was hooked to. It got the MB.

  • Happened to me recently (Score:3)

    by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @07:44PM (#61398468)

    We had a big storm in Brisbane a week ago and I had to get a tech out who replaced some stuff and made it work again.

    • Same for me in Brisbane. Apparently there are a lot of people around my area who lost internet and are waiting for a tech to come out and replace the hardware.

    • One of the big storms that went through Ipswich and Brisbane in February or March took out thousands of them then, too. Because I was lucky enough to get home before the evening peak hour, I was close to the front of the queue and it only took two days for my replacement to arrive, but the tech I was on the phone to said some of the techs around him were booking replacements to arrive in 14 days, so the struggle is real...

  • It is really hard to protect individual electronic devices from damage from a nearby lightning strike. A strike on the copper wires a device is connected to is guaranteed to fry the device. You can buy a whole house surge suppressor (essentially two capacitors that you put into your breaker box across the two phases, in the USA, to shunt surges to ground) which can provide some protection against surges caused by more remote lightning strikes, but how do you protect an individual device against what is es

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dwywit ( 1109409 )

      Land lines, or POTS, have been adequately surge protected for decades, and the equipment hasn't traditionally been very sensitive to small surges.

      An old-timey telephone handset - think black bakelite - is an incredibly robust device.

      A high-speed VDSL modem OTOH is incredibly sensitive by comparison.

      POTS = 48 - 50 volts. A 3 or 4 volt surge isn't going to cause a failure. The local exchanges are also well-protected.

      VDSL Modem = 3, 5, and 12 volts. 3 or 4 volts either way is a restart at best, or let-the-magi

    • Surge protecting the circuit breaker isn't sufficient, as that isn't the only copper. You need surge protection on the comms wiring as well.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It is really hard to protect individual electronic devices from damage from a nearby lightning strike.

      All you have to do is provide a sufficiently lower resistance path to earth than your shit. We have equipment on towers that get direct strikes regularly and it survives just fine.

      A strike on the copper wires a device is connected to is guaranteed to fry the device.

      This is rather circular. Lightning can't strike that which does not complete a circuit to earth. If your copper wire gets struck it means you've failed.

      You can buy a whole house surge suppressor (essentially two capacitors that you put into your breaker box across the two phases, in the USA, to shunt surges to ground) which can provide some protection against surges caused by more remote lightning strikes

      LOL Capacitors... that would be amusing to say the least. SPDs can only do shit if they have a sufficiently low resistance path to earth. Without it the SPD will fry and your

    • Fibre to the Curb, or FTTC, as used the the Australian NBN, has fibre coming from the exchange to a Distribution Point Unit mounted on the utility pole, or in a pit on the street, and that's the device that gets fried. Because, of course, providing a surge suppressor for all those devices would have been too expensive...

    • The state of Florida in the US is the lightning capital of the world. People put surge protectors on all electronic devices. The protectors come with coax in and out fittings to protect modems and TV cable boxes from electrical surges on those lines. Are these used in Australia?
  • I live in the mountains and there are regular thunderstorms. I long ago learned to use surge protectors and/or UPS systems on my hardware (including laptops). Some of those equipment comes with RJ9 (phone plugs) but I found that they are probably meant for traditional modems. Trying them on ADSL lines drops the quality of the input way too much. After trying several models, I found a simple RJ9/RJ9 isolator that operates at ADSL frequencies. But since the ADSL freqs vary according to location and/or provide

  • Failure of NBN Co. to install basic lightning grounding systems into the distribution boxes... in an area prone to lightning storms.

    As they say, "genius". https://knowyourmeme.com/memes... [knowyourmeme.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sd4f ( 1891894 )
      It's because none of this equipment or anything is actually designed or developed in Australia, so there's no experience or knowledge about building reliable systems. As a result, they just learn on mistakes, and that means at the expense of the users. Since they're a forced monopoly as well, users have no choice. There was a point that the NBNco was so afraid of users ditching their wired network for 5G, that they were lobbying the government to place a tax on 5G to make it price competitive.
  • Australia once made quality POT's phones with full built in protection from lightening strikes to stop peoples eardrums from being fried over the copper wire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] It seems lessons from 1960 and 1970 have been forgotten, as has the abolishment of skilled engineers and proper equipment evaluations. Never mind, Europe still has some decent standards. The solution is to do an electrical autopsy on these failed devices to see if the manufacturer c

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sd4f ( 1891894 )
      Considering the spate of infrastructure problems in Australia, the few unit buildings with structural faults in Sydney in particular, Australia is rapidly heading towards third world quality and ability.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hoofie ( 201045 )

        A city where someone can throw up a high-rise building and then PAY another party to certify it meets standards rather having to get a government or council certification.

        Quelle surprise when lots of these high-rises turn out to be riddled with faults, cracks etc.

        If you bought in anything more than 3 stories in Australia you need your head examined. But hey it was mainly Chinese money buying to get it out of China so....

  • ... fiber-to-the-curb and copper service wire.

    My old POTS service (long since abandoned) had a surge protector at my house. Grounded to the electrical grounding system next to the power meter. As time went by and my telco 'upgraded' their system out beyond the curb, this surge protector remained. And did a good job protecting the stuff inside my house.

    Did NBN cut these out when installing their FttC system? Why? Did they replace the copper service lines and bypass the old, surge protected lines? If they

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Probably. For lightening-strikes, you also need to limit the surge voltage before, usually by placing the outside installation into a grounded metal case. As they mention "sandstone", my guess would be the grounding of metal cases was defective or not done at all. Done right, you _measure_ the impedance of the grounding after doing it. But all that costs money and I think this was just done cheaply and incompetently.

  • Done right, you have both insulators in there and grounding that will be the other half of the protection system. For things to break like this, the installation has to be done incompetently or on the cheap, probably both.

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