bbc Internet: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

[axipher]

BBC

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An unnamed householder in Aberhosan, Powys, was unaware the old set would emit a signal which would interfere with the entire village's broadband.

After 18 months engineers began an investigation after a cable replacement programme failed to fix the issue.

The embarrassed householder promised not to use the television again.

The village now has a stable broadband signal.

Openreach engineers were baffled by the continuous problem and it wasn't until they used a monitoring device that they found the fault.

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The Next Web

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Like clockwork, each morning at 7AM the entire town of Aberhosan in Wales would lose its broadband connection. The mystery plagued the village for 18 months — and nobody knew why. Until now. The culprit? An old television set.

After numerous cable replacements failed to fix the the issue, an investigation by Openreach technicians discovered that an unnamed Aberhosan resident was unaware their TV would emit a signal that would interfere with the entire village’s broadband infrastructure, BBC reports.

Source

 

Without knowing the details of the TV in questions, it might have been built to proper standards at the time, but the TV set could have just been used for so long that it's now out of spec and causing issues.  It's baffling that it took this long to find the problem and that other electrical issues weren't also popping up, or maybe they were just not enough of a problem for the village.