Welsh Village Traces 18 Months of Internet Outages to Old TV

The mystery of the busted broadband has finally been solved. After 18 months of searching, technicians this week discovered the source of internet outages and slowdowns in a rural Welsh village: an old television set.

Every morning for more than a year, residents of Aberhosan (and some neighboring communities) experienced poor broadband connectivity—despite repeated efforts by local Openreach telecom engineers to fix the fault.

Large sections of cable were replaced and frequent tests proved the network was in working order. Still, at 7am each day, folks found their web connections briefly severed. "As a team, we'd been facing an ongoing issue in Aberhosan for months," according to Openreach engineer Michael Jones. "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 of it."

As a final resort, Jones brought in a "crack squad" of experts from around the UK "to do one final test to see if the fault was being caused by a phenomenon known as SHINE (Single High-level Impulse Noise)," he explained. The event occurs when interference is generated as a burst—when a device is powered on or off, for instance.

"By using a device called a Spectrum Analyser, 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," according to Jones. "And at 7am, like clockwork, it happened. Our device picked up a large burst of electrical interference in the village."

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The source, he said, was traced to a property in the village, where, at 7am every morning, the occupant turned on their old TV, unintentionally crippling locals' internet connection. "As you can imagine, when we pointed this out to the resident, they were mortified that their old second-hand 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 added.

Shinings may not be as rare as people think, though; anything with electric components—outdoor lights, microwaves, CCTV cameras, etc.—can potentially impact broadband. The people of Aberhosan, meanwhile, won't be plagued by old TVs much longer: The village will be connected to fiber later this year, as part of Openreach's expansion across rural Wales.