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News from the BBC of a SHINE (single high-level impulse noise)[*] that interfered with a Welsh village's internet connection on a daily basis.
The mystery of why an entire village lost its broadband every morning at 7am was solved when engineers discovered an old television was to blame.
[...] After 18 months engineers began an investigation after a cable replacement programme failed to fix the issue.
[...] Openreach engineers were baffled by the continuous problem and it wasn't until they used a monitoring device that they found the fault.
The householder would switch their TV set on at 7am every morning[sic] - and electrical interference emitted by their second-hand television was affecting the broadband signal.
The owner, who does not want to be identified, was "mortified" to find out their old TV was causing the problem, according to Openreach.
"They immediately agreed to switch it off and not use it again," said engineer Michael Jones.
While some properties in the surrounding area have Fibre to the Premises, several homes in the Aberhosan area are still limited to using copper-based ADSL connections.
[*] Broadband: Understanding REIN and SHINE.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday September 24 2020, @01:34AM
RFI and EMI is all too common. Back in the day, before the FCC tightened regulations, the Apple II computer I had screwed up TV reception. The computer and TV were in opposite corners of the house, about 100 ft apart, and the computer was still able to add a lot of noise to the signal.
Years later, I tried to turn an old computer into a server running 24/7. The 1G hard drive had some tremendous RFI leakage that made it impossible to receive AM radio stations in the next room. On the radio, you could hear every motion of the arm. It should not have caused such interference, but devices can have defects that cause far more RFI than they're supposed to emit.
Similarly, when I used a 56K modem, I often had a very hard time connecting, and then the connection would be extremely slow. We had close on to a dozen extensions plugged in to the phone jacks that the builder had put in each room. When I started checking them, I found that each phone lowered the connection speed by about 2K. Except for one exceptionally bad phone that was somehow interfering so much I often could not connect at all. It was the same model as several other phones. Unplugging that one phone instantly solved the connection problems my modem was experiencing. Modem was connecting immediately, and achieving at least 30K data rates. Unplugging the rest of the phones allowed the modem to finally reach 56K speeds.
Finally, there was a year when the house next door was vacant. That year we had the best TV reception ever. When new occupants at last moved in, the reception became as bad as usual, and sometimes worse. Could always tell when the neighbors vacuumed.
There have also been many stories of desktop computers that interfered with their own built in audio system.
So, yeah, totally believable that an old TV could cause that much trouble.