OAPs’ TV wiped out village’s broadband

FOR 18 months, residents of a village were left baffled and frustrated when their broadband went down every day at 7am.

Engineers were repeatedly called out to fix the fault. But despite countless checks and even the costly replacement of large sections of cable, they simply could not establish what was wrong.

It wasn’t until a ‘crack squad’ of experts from across the country were drafted in that the source of the problem was found – a retired couple who unwittingly cut the broadband signal of all the villagers every time they switched on their old TV.

Technicians used monitoring equipment to work out that a large burst of ‘electrical noise’ from the ancient set, bought second-hand for £30, was causing interference with other devices across remote Aberhosan in mid Wales.

Grandparents Alun and Elaine Rees were last night identified as the embarrassed couple. They had been turning the TV on at 7am every day to watch Good Morning Britain with Piers Morgan.

As soon as an engineer told them the problem, they vowed never to use the TV again. Mr Rees, 67, told The Sun: ‘He told me we’d better get rid of the set immediately because it was interfering with the internet connection all over the village.

‘He said we’d have the whole village on our doorstep if anyone found out we were the cause of the problem. Our son lives next door and he was having building work done so we chucked it on his skip.’

The TV was found to be emitting single high-level impulse noise – interference which can knock out other devices.

Suzanne Rutherford of Openreach, which maintains the UK’s broadband network, said: ‘Sadly this isn’t quite as rare as people may think. Anything with electric components – from outdoor lights to microwaves to CCTV cameras – can have an impact on your broadband connection.’