Old TV set interfered with village’s DSL Internet each day for 18 months

guest · Sep 23, 2020

Old TV set interfered with village’s DSL Internet each day for 18 months
Engineers traced interference with a spectrum analyzer
September 22, 2020
https://arstechnica.com/information...villages-dsl-internet-each-day-for-18-months/

A 400-resident village in Wales suffered 18 months of DSL Internet outages each morning until the culprit was identified as electrical interference from an old TV set.

The residents of Aberhosan mysteriously experienced the outages each morning at 7am. Openreach, a BT subsidiary that provides Internet service in the UK, replaced old cables in the village in an attempt to stop the outages.

"Unfortunately, this didn't resolve the problems and so they began sleuthing for electromagnetic interference with the aid of a spectrum analyzer," according to an article in ISPreview today.
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DSL susceptible to interference
The resident's promise not to use that TV again has let the village's broadband network get back to normal. It's not clear how long each morning's outage lasted or why the interference propagated throughout the whole village, as opposed to just affecting the TV owner's house.

DSL lines are susceptible to electromagnetic interference from CRT (cathode ray tube) TVs and other devices, as US ISP Sonic notes in a help article.
OpenReach reportedly plans to connect Aberhosan to fiber later this year, which could help prevent future outages, but copper DSL lines heading into homes might remain in place if this isn't a full fiber-to-the-home upgrade.
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Residents are understandably relieved that the immediate problem has been solved. "We've had engineers coming to visit all the time and none seemed to know what the problem was," one man told the Daily Mail.
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Comment
This sort of thing used to happen fairly regularly on cable systems.

Used to work a tech at a cable company, and we had an entire node that would go down around the same time every afternoon for an hour or two.
After significant searching we tracked the problem down to a faulty RF adapter for some kid's N64 .
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Rasheed187 · Sep 26, 2020

I also wonder if 5G might interfere with cable TV.

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Old TV set interfered with village’s DSL Internet each day for 18 months

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