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The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Welsh Broadband

The tiny North Wales village of Aberhosan was plagued by mysterious broadband issues. The BFD.

There’s an apocryphal story that tells of a hospital where, on cue every Friday evening, any patients left in a particular bed of the ICU would mysteriously expire. For weeks, this went on. Apparently stable patients would suddenly shuffle off this mortal coil like clockwork, every Friday evening. Finally, baffled doctors installed a CCTV camera – and saw the cleaning lady come in to do her weekly clean… and unplugging the life-support in order to use the power point for her floor polisher.

While this story is a myth, there are many real-life examples of simple snafus, innocent or intentional, wreaking disproportionate havoc. When I worked at a trade-training school, the ingenuity of the students in screwing the computer system was astonishing. One day, the entire network suddenly went out. No one in the building could access internet or internal communications. The IT manager spent nearly the whole day trying to track down the source of the problem.

Finally, in one of the classrooms, he found a data cable that had been plugged across two outlets. He unplugged one end, et voilà! The entire system was restored.

Telecom engineers in North Wales recently faced a similar problem.

For 18 months, residents of the village of Aberhosan were frustrated by broadband issues. A very particular broadband issue, as it happened.

Every morning at 7am, broadband for the whole village – and some neighbouring communities – either slowed to a crawl or cut out altogether.

Frequent tests proved that the network was working fine and local engineers even replaced large sections of cable that served the village – but the problems remained.

Local Openreach engineer Michael Jones to called on the assistance of colleagues from Openreach’s Chief Engineer team – described as the company’s telecoms equivalent of the ‘SAS’[…]

“As a final resort we decided to bring in a crack squad of engineers from the Chief Engineers Office who were based in other parts of the UK to investigate.

The team faced plenty of issues even getting to Aberhosan.

“Accommodation was understandably hard to find due to the Covid-19 lockdown but we did eventually manage to find a guest house with a field near Llandrindod Wells, so the team camped there and made the 55-mile journey to Aberhosan early the next morning.

Even with the nerd-SAS on the job, the issue defied all efforts to solve it.

“Having exhausted all other avenues we wanted to do one final test to see if the fault was being caused by a phenomenon known as SHINE (Single High-level Impulse Noise) where electrical interference is emitted from an appliance that can then have an impact on broadband connectivity.

“By using a device called a Spectrum Analyser we walked up and down the village in the torrential rain at 6am to see if we could find an ‘electrical noise’ to support our theory.

“And at 7am, like clockwork, it happened! Our device picked up a large burst of electrical interference in the village.

“The source of the ‘electrical noise’ was traced to a property in the village.

So, what was it? Some local would-be genius building an unlicensed particle accelerator in their garden shed? A local stoner firing up the lighting for their hydroponics?

“It turned out that at 7am every morning the occupant would switch on their old TV which would in-turn knock out broadband for the entire village.

So, it all came down to old Mrs. Jones tuning into Good Morning Britain on her old Pye telly.

“As you can imagine when we pointed this out to the resident, they were mortified that their old second hand TV was the cause of an entire village’s broadband problems, and they immediately agreed to switch it off and not use again.”

Since locating the cause of the fault that has dogged not only the residents of Aberhosan but also properties surrounding the village, there have been no further reported issues with the network.

Just in case, the village is on schedule to be connected to fibre.

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