Internet engineers racked their brains for a year and a half trying to figure out why a rural village in Wales was losing its broadband connection every morning. The Internet worked fine until late at night, but around 7:00 a.m., residents suffered slowdowns and even lost their connection altogether for a little while. The culprit turned out to be an old TV. More precisely, it was electrical interference from the old TVs.

After a year and a half of troubleshooting, we finally found the problem. According to a local Openreach engineer named Michael (via Gizmodo), the ISP tried replacing entire sections of cable and frequently ran diagnostic tests, all to no avail.

"We had exhausted all other avenues to see if the failure was caused by SHINE (Single High-level Impulse Noise), a phenomenon in which electrical interference is emitted from electrical equipment that affects the broadband connection, We wanted to do one last test," Michael said.

It was the last resort employed by a "crack squad of engineers" based in other parts of the UK who were called in to investigate the mysterious outage. Camped in the area, the team used a device called a spectrum analyzer to search for jamming signals and "went up and down the village in a torrential downpour" at 6:00 in the morning. And an hour later it happened, as it always has for the past year and a half.

"Our equipment picked up a massive burst of electrical interference in the village. The source of the 'electrical noise' was on a piece of land in the village. It turned out that every morning at 7:00 that resident would switch on his old TV, which was shutting down broadband for the entire village," Michael said.

The resident was "appalled that his old used TV was causing broadband problems for the entire village" and naturally agreed to turn the TV off permanently.

"Sadly, this is not as uncommon as people think. Anything with electrical components, from outdoor lighting to microwave ovens to CCTV cameras, can affect your broadband connection," added Suzanne Rutherford, Openreach's chief engineer for Wales.

Since then, the Internet has worked fine for residents of the rural village. And hopefully, the person who owned the TV that caused the uproar was able to get a new unit.