Low-tech jammer

As classes are conducted online to avoid face-to-face contact that may infect students and teachers with the contagious coronavirus disease, they actually need more than computers and

Internet connection or data for this new mode of learning.

Students and teachers in the countryside, where dead spots are common, will have the added challenge of finding a reliable hotspot not within their village but in high areas where trees don’t obstruct Internet signal.

In a province in Mindanao, teachers positioned themselves along a highway where signal was steady to take their orientation on online teaching. This was the same reason a student set up a makeshift desk on top of a tree.

In a hill near Lake Sebu in South Cotabato province, four kids discovered a spot where Internet signal was strong. The friends then built a shanty out of bamboo and coconut leaves at the site to serve as their online “classroom.” During bad weather or when they have homework, they stay at the shanty to sleep, so they also brought cooking utensils to prepare their meals.

Incidentally, it’s not only in third world countries like the Philippines where Internet access is proving to be a challenge. In fact, in the village of Aberhosan in Powys, Wales, United Kingdom, Internet signal got lost every morning.

Engineers from Openreach, the company that maintains the UK’s digital network, recently went to inspect the village to solve the problem. Thinking the network cable was bad, they replaced it, but the Internet still crashed every morning.

Openreach’s chief engineering team theorized that a phenomenon called single high-level impulse noise or SHINE, an electrical interference coming from an appliance, was causing the problem. Using a spectrum analyzer, the team searched the village for SHINE starting at 6 a.m.

Finally, they detected the electrical interference from a house. When they visited it, they learned the resident turned on an old TV every morning, knocking out the village’s broadband connection.

The resident no longer uses the TV, and the Internet interruption which persisted for 18 months finally ended.