smart - Does 'The internet of things' include items to manage music and locks, or limited to data-gathering?

08
2014-07
  • Sander Schaeffer

    First of all, I'm terribly unsure whether this fits this stack or should be posted in another. Comment if I'm wrong with the correct one.

    On topic
    So I'm investigating the Internet of Things as a subject and I always thought that the Internet of Things is anything that has a connection with the internet and thereby can make our life easier, but some blogs on the web say The Internet of Things is about gathering data, such as health or anything.

    So in short: What is the Internet of things? Are Philips Hue light a part of the Internet of Things? And are Nest smoke alarms too? And what about all of Domotica, such as controlling the locks of the door and the temperature of all heating in the house? Are they part of the internet of things too?

    Thanks in advance for clearing up these 'things'. :)

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    Related Question

    internet - IP Micro-outages, telephone micro-outages, and CATV micro-outages
  • Michael Graff

    This is a long and complicated question, mostly because it has been going on for 2.5 years without a solution in sight. It also is only one-third computer related, the other two-thirds are cable TV and cable-phone related.

    Background

    I have COX Communications for a cable provider, and we get Internet, digital cable TV, and digital phone service through them. The Internet is a SB5101 right now, and has been a DPC2100 and SB5120 in the past. Same results. The phone service is provided through a telephone interface mounted on the outside of the house (not classic VoIP) and the CATV is through a Scientific Atlanta receiver without DVR. I do have a TiVo connected to the CATV box.

    Symptoms

    • The CATV shows "blocking" -- sometimes very very short duration where a few blocks appear on the screen. Sometimes it lasts long enough that the video "pauses" for 2-5 seconds, and rarely but not unseen the audio also fails.
    • The CATV decoder box shows no correctable (FEC) or uncorrectable errors. That is, all BER counters are zero for the video stream.
    • The Internet shows "micro-outages" where it appears that sent packets are not making it out, but I continue to receive packets from local modems. That is, pings stop coming back, but I continue to see modems broadcast for DHCP, and sometimes they ask more than once.
    • The cable modem shows no errors during this time, but cable modems lie like you would not believe. It is actually possible to unplug the coax from the modem for 20 seconds and it reports NO ERRORS to the provider's tools.
    • The phone service cuts out for 1-3 seconds, infrequently. When this happens, I hear NOTHING (not even comfort noise) and the remote side hears a "click" as if I were getting a call waiting message. However, there is no call incoming, other than the one I'm currently on of course.
    • Things SEEM to happen more frequently when the temperature outside swings from cold to warm, so fall/spring seems worse than summer/winter.
    • All micro-outages occur between once or twice a day (which I could ignore) to 10 times per hour.
    • All SNR, signal levels, noise levels, etc. show very close to optimal when measured.

    COX's diagnosis

    This is a continual pain for me. Over the last 2.5 years, they have opened, "fixed" something, and closed the tickets. They close it without confirming that it is indeed better, and when I reopen they cannot do that, but instead they open a new ticket and send yet another low-level tech out to do the same signal tests and report that all is OK.

    I've finally gotten a line tech who has a clue and is motivated enough to pursue this with me. We have tried things like switching the local nodes over to UPS and generator power, but this does not trigger the noise. We have tried replacing all cabling, the tap outside my house, the modem, the CATV decoder -- all without resolution.

    Recently they have decided it is both my computer or switch, my TiVo, and my phone that are all broken and causing this issue.

    My debugging steps

    I spent the worse day of my TV-watching life yesterday and part of today. I watched live TV without the TiVo. I witnessed blocking, but it did "feel different." and was actually more severe. Some days it is better, some days it is worse, so perhaps this was just a very bad day.

    Today, I connected the TiVo to my DVD player, and ran two very long movies through it. I saw no blocking at all during nearly 6 hours of video.

    Suggestions?

    Does anyone have any suggestions on what to do next?

    I understand perhaps only the IP side can be addressed here, but it is one of the more limiting debugging options.


    • Related Answers
  • Max A.

    What kind of experience are your neighbors having? If any of them are using the same cable company and live close enough that the likelihood of them using the same underlying infrastructure is high, could it be that they're all having the same issues as you?

    Otherwise, cable companies can be a royal pain to deal with. Call them and threaten to switch to another carrier if they don't make a good faith effort to improve your service. The technical issues are IMHO irrelevant. The larger issue you're faced with is crappy customer service.

  • Jamie Cox

    Are any WiFi connections involved here, or is it all wired connections?

    Also, you can see my similar quest to get my cable performance fixed here:

    http://macmad.org/blog/2009/09/road-runner-performance-saga/

    and see if that gives you any ideas.