A strange thing happens in a little Welsh village every day at 7am.
At that time, without fail, the entire village of Aberhosan loses its broadband internet and telephone service.
And no one had a clue why. Until now.
It took more than 18 months for engineers to investigate why the 400 local homes lost their internet at the same time each day, finally identifying the source as an elderly resident’s old TV set.
Openreach, the firm that maintains telephone and broadband Internet infrastructure in Britain, said engineers visited the village after nearly all of the settlement’s 400 residents reported losing their broadband.
Initially, investigators set out to determine whether electrical interference was to blame.
“We walked up and down the village in the torrential rain at 6 am to see if we could find an electrical noise to support our theory. And at 7am, like clockwork, it happened,” engineer Michael Jones said.
Our device picked up a large burst of electrical interference.”
Jones said the team traced the interference to a home, where they discovered its surprising origin – an old TV set.
The broadband outages coincided with the elderly resident’s daily routine of switching on the TV in the morning.
“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.
