How An Old TV Caused An Entire Village To Lose Broadband Access Daily For 18 Months

• A mysterious broadband problem was brought up to UK-based tech firm Openreach.
• According to the company, the village of Aberhosan experienced broadband difficulties each day at 7 AM.
• Engineers repeatedly visited the area but failed to identify the source of the issue. They later learned that the daily disruption was caused by an elderly couple’s second hand television.

Imagine the hassle of losing access to your broadband every single day for 18 months at exactly the same time. Sounds weird, right? Well that’s the terrible scenario for the residents of a Wales village and no one could figure out why – until only recently.

In a statement issued by Openreach, we learn that a group paid several visits to theAberhosan village but did not discover any issues in the network.They went as far as replacing cables but even that didn’t end the strange tech trouble experienced by the locals on a daily basis.

Local Openreach engineer Michael Jones shared:

“As a team we’d been facing an ongoing issue in Aberhosan for months. Not being able to solve the fault for our customers left us feeling frustrated and downbeat, but we were determined to get to the bottom it.

“As a final resort we decided to bring in a crack squad of engineers from the Chief Engineers Office who were based in other parts of the UK to investigate… Having exhausted all other avenues we wanted to do one final test to see if the fault was being caused by a phenomenon known as SHINE (Single High-level Impulse Noise) where electrical interference is omitted from an appliance that can then have an impact on broadband connectivity.”

So how did they finally pinpoint and solve the problem?

The team used a device called Spectrum Analyser which helped them pick up “a large burst of electrical interference in the village.”

It was a second-hand television all along!

“The source of the ‘electrical noise’ was traced to a property in the village. It turned out that at 7am every morning the occupant would switch on their old tv which would in-turn knock out broadband for the entire village,” Jones explained.

The concerned resident was “mortified” upon hearing about it and “immediately agreed to switch it off and not use again,” said the engineer.