BT Tower

MW

Mike W 26 December 2017 10:56am

I understand there’s the security perspective but I’m thinking of the worst case scenario if something were to bring the tower down and damage the surrounding buildings. During 9/11 a local Verizon switching center was near ground zero and suffered damage causing outages.

That's true of any building though. All businesses should have Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans. BT will be no different - and neither will their customers - like the BBC or ITV.

I recall the Manchester tunnel fire in 2004, that took out a load of copper and fibre.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/03/29/bt_fire_disrupts_emergency_services/

I seem to recall DTT feeds to Northern Ireland were affected by that ?

Didn't it affect anything going north of Oxford Road too? I recall reading about it on here once.

Wonder what state the Guardian Exchange is in now, I know Kingsway and Anchor have extensive flooding and BT constantly have to pump them to keep them usable

VM

VMPhil 29 December 2017 12:03pm

Inspector Sands posted:

mapperuo posted:

Unrelated to BT Tower potentially but related to quality monitoring. If a live TV show was going to have a test card in it as part of a skit or joke, do they need to tell the folks monitoring the feed so they don't have a mini heart attack?

It's usually mentioned in the paperwork that accompanies every programme (or on live programmes mentioned on talkback), but that doesn't get seen outside of playout. To those downstream in the distribution chain it's unexpected.

Sometimes a trailer uses some effect that looks like a fault and you get used to it by the time it stops airing.

There is currently a trailer on Sky One for new Simpsons and Modern Family, which uses a colour bar test card (in reference to them apparently being so new they don't have any clips of them yet). Every time I see it I wonder if somebody somewhere is having a mild panic when it comes on.

It also says 'CONALL' on it - is that from a real test card then and not a mock up?

HC

Hatton Cross 29 December 2017 2:56pm

To use a short code for a real life satellite/fibre circuit name in a trail featuring a test card, I would have thought would have been highly irresponsible.

The name may be a give away. 'Conall', or Con All - as in, not real and to con everybody watching thinking this test card is actually real.

EL

elmarko 29 December 2017 10:38pm

Continuity: all?

All I could think of

IS

Inspector Sands 30 December 2017 5:31am

Unless it's the name of the person who made the trail?

MY

MY83 31 December 2017 4:06pm

Inspector Sands posted:

Unless it's the name of the person who made the trail?

Constance Allthwaite?

BA

bilky asko 31 December 2017 4:43pm

MY83 posted:

Inspector Sands posted:

Unless it's the name of the person who made the trail?

Constance Allthwaite?

Clement O'Nall?

MY

MY83 31 December 2017 4:51pm

Conal Lightfeather

IS

Inspector Sands 1 January 2018 12:03pm

I was thinking more of someone whose first name is Conall.... it is an Irish/Scottish boys name

HA

harshy Founding member 2 January 2018 8:50am

Technical question receiveing fibered sources, how do you tune it in is it like a cable receiver or is it like a satellite feed, you have to tune it in?

GE

thegeek Founding member 3 January 2018 4:39pm

harshy posted:

Technical question receiveing fibered sources, how do you tune it in is it like a cable receiver or is it like a satellite feed, you have to tune it in?

It depends.

Facility Lines (aka local ends) are full-bandwidth 3G HD-SDI - there's a box on one end that turns the electrical signal into light (at a certain wavelength), and a receiver at the other that turns it back into an electrical signal again. (The brand name they use escapes me. All I can remember is that they come in blue boxes.)

You can also use something called Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing (CWDM) to combine several wavelengths onto the same fibre, for more efficient use of your holes in the ground. You can even have the CWDM happening in various places along the fibre, but each time you do it will introduce some light loss, and thus reducing the distance you can get your signal without needing to regenerate it.

BT also have their own MPLS network, which is essentially a country-wide WAN. They'll set up a dedicated 'pipe' between two (or more locations), and put an MPEG encoder on one end, and an MPEG decoder on the other, and send an ASI transport stream over IP between the two. These encoders/decoders are typically the same as get used for satellite transmissions - ie Atemes or Ericssons.

HA

harshy Founding member 4 January 2018 8:49am

Thanks thegeek so i am guessing each line has a mpeg receiving/encoding unit so no need to tune in anything?

(December 2017)