Old TV knocked out village's broadband every day for 18 months

Sept. 22 (UPI) -- Engineers investigating why an entire Welsh village lost broadband signal at the same time every day for 18 months said they finally identified the source: an elderly resident's old TV set.

Openreach, the firm that maintains telephone and broadband Internet infrastructure in Britain, said engineers visited the village of Aberhosan after nearly all of the settlement's 400 residents reported losing their broadband signal for 18 months every day at 7 a.m.

He said the investigators set out to determine whether electrical interference was to blame.

"We walked up and down the village in the torrential rain at 6 a.m. to see if we could find an electrical noise to support our theory. And at 7 a.m., like clockwork, it happened. Our device picked up a large burst of electrical interference," engineer Michael Jones said.

Jones said the team traced the interference to a home, where they discovered its surprising origin: an elderly resident's old TV set.

The broadband outages coincided with the resident's daily routine of switching on the TV set at 7 a.m.

"As you can imagine, when we pointed this out to the resident, they were mortified that their old secondhand TV was the cause of an entire village's broadband problems, and they immediately agreed to switch it off and not use it again," Jones said.