Service Electric Cablevision/Service Electric Cable TV Discussion

Jed1 · 2025-01-18T18:38:30+00:00

Hi, I'm picking up where we left off at DSL Reports. This thread is for anything Service Electric related. I even added the other division so this thread will cover all the Service Electric divisions. SECV is Hazleton, Sunbury, and Birdsboro and SECTV is Allentown, Wilkes Barre, and Phillipsburg NJ. Hopefully everybody from the old site will find their way here.

cypherstream

Look at the comments on their latest post. Outages over 54 hours and counting.

I wonder what it could be. Everyone I know on coax is fine. Seems fiber customers most likely. Its also not entirely localized to one specific area. People mentioning Selinsgrove, Kulpnmont ,Bloomsburg, Mt Carmel, Boyertown, Mahanoy City, Treverton. Whatever it is it must be major. Like did they run out of IP’s to hand out? One person on Nextdoor claimed the person they talked to said it had to so something with handing out IP addresses (DHCP). Yet the majority of the HFC folks are doing just fine. PTD controls the IP space, so I’d imagine they are involved. Curious if its affecting Blue Ridge or Ironton Telephone fiber.

Latest message on the website:
Outage Update 4/9 2:30pm

Our teams are working nonstop to resolve the network issues affecting service in certain areas. Service has been restored for some impacted customers, but we do not yet have a confirmed timeline for full restoration.

We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience.

bsocko

I spoke with a friend in Kulpmont, and he said the customers having issues are using Plume systems. He only has the ONT (no Plume hardware), and his connection is working fine.

He also mentioned hearing that a recent power outage may have caused firmware updates to be pushed prematurely.

My HFC connection has been pretty unreliable over the past week as well. pfSense has failed over to my T-Mobile backup multiple times due to latency spikes and intermittent connectivity issues—some pages won’t resolve at all, while others load very slowly.

I’ve also noticed in the pfSense dashboard that unloaded latency has increased from 8 ms to 12 ms, which is the highest I’ve seen.

According to the PTD fiber map, they recently upgraded the links between SECV hubs to a 100 Gbps ring topology.

cypherstream

bsocko Oh wow thats an interesting development. Yeah the one lady on Nextdoor said she had a small Nokia box plugged into a white tower. Well the new plumes are Zyxel white towers. In a later post she said she also has a plume pod plugged into an outlet in the bedroom, no other wires (wifi mesh I guess).

It seems mostly PON customers likely because they suggest Plume at time of conversion from cable to pon. I’m just going to run the ONT into my USG-Fiber. I have 3 Unifi AP’s hanging off my unifi switch.

But wild, thats a 64 mile stretch (Kulpmont to Birdsboro).

cypherstream

I checked Blue Ridge social media and nothing. So yeah I guess this did only affect SECV. Let me jump around to SE Lehigh Valley and others.

bsocko

What i find interesting is how our SECV designed their rings for redundancy between hubs and divisions with 100gb.

SECTV and BRCTV dont seem to be any where close to the caliber of SECV.

https://www.penteledata.net/map

cypherstream

bsocko I love that map. Just a few racks down from us is the PTD rack in one of the nodes on that list. No wonder I get 10ms ping (on cable modem) to a domain controller inside our VPN from my home SECV network. Including my router, our VPN firewall is only 9 hops away. 9-10ms ping. Can’t wait to see what the latency is once I go to fiber.

Oh and nothing on Blue Ridge or Service Electric Cable TV & Communications facebook. But guess what… they both use Eero for managed wifi. SECV is the only one on Plume… so that makes sense.

When I was at Kalahari Resorts in Mt Pocono… on guest wifi, a traceroute to my home IP was all internal IP’s 172.16.x.x. Never even had to leave the PTD.net network. My wireguard connection was like a straight point to point in some regard. Granted the bandwidth there was not great given its hotel wifi and a lot of guests… but for what it was, it was workable.

Everything in there is labeled ptd.net. Tags for things like to 401n broad, to sm (south mountain), and other recognizable acronyms. Sharing a blurred photo to protect their privacy.

bsocko

Latency and jitter continues to climb.

cypherstream

bsocko Are you on fiber yet? Broadband latency on their rate cards is wild.

bsocko

cypherstream
No, this is the CM9200 on HFC. They have not even began to hang fiber in Elysburg, it seems we will be very last.

cypherstream

I just pinged one of our users on res-olt.flt.ptd.net and got ping between 5 and 6 ms. We have to other users on our VPN a res-olt.flt.ptd.net and res-olt.brd.ptd.net but they have ICMP disabled. However if I tracerout to that birdsboro one (She does live in downtown Birdsboro) I get 1-2ms up until it times out (customer router).

cypherstream

It’s a Nokia ONT issue. They thought it was plume. Things were fine but if an ONT rebooted it just wouldn’t get an IP address. A lot of power flickers happened Monday and when those ONT rebooted- bye bye internet.

Those who still have service had a UPS on it or still on DOCSIS.

It’s been sporadic. Sometimes they’d get an IP and then lose it and get it back, vice versa. But it’s NOT a layer 1 or 2 issue.

zeroskatr512

I’m on SECV fiber at home and my work.
On Mar 17th there was an outage that affected both ONTs for about 45 minutes.
This week only the ONT at work had an outage for about 25 minutes ,and another for 2 minutes.
Each system is on a UPS so this issue isn’t strictly related to ONTs rebooting from power loss.
So maybe not as much of an issue for the Boyertown area.
I had assumed it was related to work they were doing expanding fiber.

cypherstream

The message this morning on the page:

Outage Update 4/10 9:00am

Our Engineering team and vendors are working continuously to restore service in the remaining affected areas. We have made progress in restoring some of the impacted areas. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience.

Got confirmation that after 3 days someone in a Birdsboro suburb is back online, but a different person in the same area is still offline since Monday.

The extent of why the Nokia ONT was not passing an IP Address to the connected equipment is unknown. Not sure those of us on the customer side will ever see an explanation.

cypherstream

Latest update:

Outage Update 4/10 2:00pm

Our engineers have identified a software issue in the Wi-Fi system that is generating excessive network traffic for some of our fiber customers. This additional traffic has slowed or interrupted service for some of our customers. We are actively working on a fix and have made progress restoring service in some of the impacted areas. However, we do not yet have a confirmed timeline for full restoration. We understand this has been frustrating, and we will provide credits to affected customers.

cypherstream

WFMZ picked up the story
https://www.wfmz.com/news/area/berks/repairs-underway-after-service-electric-outage-hits-berks-county-customers/article_d6828806-ae75-4fe8-ade5-66f25bea4c25.html

cypherstream

Last two updates. Reports on social media do confirm people are back online.

4/10: 8:00 pm - The majority of fiber customers impacted by the outage have now been restored. Our teams are continuing to work on the remaining affected areas and will share additional updates as progress continues.

4/10 6:00 pm - Service restoration continues for additional affected customers in the impacted areas. Thank you for your patience as we work to resolve the remaining issues.

cypherstream

No more messaging on the website. As far as I know all affected fiber customers have been resolved.

Some kind of networking software issue. From the description on 4/10 sounds like plume was maybe causing a broadcast storm. Get enough of them off an optical splitter and maybe basically cause a DoS on the network where people cant even reach DHCP.

Not sure of the full scope or technical details, but perhaps they’ll issue a press release. My neighborhood is still on track to be lit up in 30-60 days and I will convert over to fiber when ready.

cypherstream

ACE Construction is also contracting for SECV on aerial fiber construction near me.

bsocko

I see yet more and more complaints in the local Facebook groups about SECV.
I don’t know what they are doing that they are making their fiber network be so unrealiable so much but everyone is screaming.
Everyone I know with the FTTH is having nothing but issues with complete outages..

I am on the 2,0000×200 hfc plan and it appears they are having issues with the upstream or else they pushed a new provisioning file to my modem. Now all my speeds the past few days are 2000×1000

cypherstream

I saw someone on facebook that I went to Penn College with complaining. I didn’t reach out if they had fiber or docsis.

They still didn’t finish the splicing in my neighborhood. We have fiber terminals in our pedestals but they still have coils of fiber taped wtih a cone at the back of certain pedestals with the lids slightly cracked to let the coil of wire rest on the back of the ped.

I’m getting pretty good speeds on my 1 gig docsis plan, 900-960 down. Upload is all over the place between 50 to 100 mbps. Its mostly 100mbps though. I think my *arr suite is just getting lots of stuff.

I came on here to see what Nokia ONT people are getting. I’m curious if I could get an WAS-110 SFP+ and clone the Nokia info and bypass having an ONT - go directly into my USG-Fiber. https://pon.wiki/category/nokia/

The issue that caused an outage for almost a full week I think had to do with provisioning. ONT’s were connected with light level, but the downstream device wasn’t getting an IP address. Kind of like they didn’t have a record of mac addresses and maybe what took so long was they had to manually reprovision every single account, or rebuild the provisioning system or something. I don’t know - its just a theory. They are redundant, Birdsboro and Hazelton - but maybe something corrupted the shared database or something and they had to start from scratch.

bsocko

cypherstream

My friend in Kulpmont was just talking with me about the the direct SFP “Hack” I will report back if he decides to try it

« Previous Page Next Page »