It was the TV’s fault! The mystery lasted several months and it was not easy to understand what was going on. Aberhosan, a small village with 400 inhabitants, belonging to Wales, had a problem with broadband / Internet. Every day, around 7 am, the network started to slow down and was really inoperable.
After several months of mystery there it was realized that the fault was with an old TV. But what is the impact of TV after all?
Engineers with more experience at the Openreach company had to transform themselves into real detectives to solve an 18-month mystery that plagued broadband calls from residents of the rural village of Aberhosan, near Machynlleth, Wales.
Old TV created a phenomenon known as SHINE
For months, the inhabitants of Aberhosan (and also in some neighboring communities) had problems with broadband connectivity, every morning starting at 7 am. The problem became a mystery and its solution was not easy. Network diagnostics were carried out, infrastructure cables were changed, but the problem remained.
It was then that a local engineer, Michael Jones, asked for help from Openreach, which is the organization responsible for all household and business interconnection infrastructure in the UK to the national broadband and telephone network.
Having exhausted all other possibilities, we decided to do one last test to see if the problem was being caused by a phenomenon known as SHINE (Single High-Level Impulse Noise), in which the electrical interference emitted by a device can impact the functioning of broadband networks.
Using a spectrum analyzer, we walked around the village in torrential rain at 6 am in an attempt to find an 'electrical noise' that would support our theory. And at 7 am, on the dot, he showed up! The device detected a large wave of electromagnetic interference in the village.
The source of the signal was unexpected. According to Jones, “the source of the noise was a house in the village. We found out that at 7 am, every morning, one of the residents turned on an old TV, and the interference generated by it even managed to make the broadband of the entire village inoperable.
According to Openreach, since the old TV was switched off the broadband network never had any problems.
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