Old Skool broadband problems ..

Broadband: Old TV signal hit village internet speed for 18 months https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-54239180

18 months though ?!?!

The owner, who does not want to be identified, was "mortified" to find out their old TV was causing the problem, according to Openreach.

Damn right they didn't want to be identified...

18 months doesn't surprise me at all. My experience is that Openreach are incredibly reluctant to check for RF related problems. All too happy to do traditional analogue pair quality tests etc but very, very rarely have I seen anyone consider the RF spectrum that A/VDSL relies on. It's all E-side/D-side swaps, threats of SFI charges, right when tested/it's an adaptive service and it adapted to being [censored], even when you present buzzing radios to them.

Need to get out of the analogue PQ test only mindset and by default start considering the RF environment. Equipping engineers with an ADSL/VDSL frequency aware radio would be a good start.

Equipping engineers with an ADSL/VDSL frequency aware radio would be a good start.

It could be that many carry them already.

Making people understand that not everything that makes a radio buzz affects DSL might help also.

Interesting article. I have an issue with noise on my line dropping the noise margin down from 6db to 2db or less. It's not large enough to cause the line to drop the connection, however does seem household based as it tends to be in mid-evenings and sometimes in the mornings on a weekend. I notice the neighbour also has a very old CRT TV next door and is first in line to the joint box with me second. .

So the only step you might try would be to, at your fuse board, have EVERYTHING switched off apart from the power to your router, and the all other plugs on the same ring disconnected .... then monitor the SNR from your mobile . Cumbersome, but might show if the issue is within your property or not.

‘Guessing’ at probable causes is not worth effort without some equipment to assist in the hunting.

Hunting REIN is a dark art, it requires persistence, determination, and more than a little luck.

After your helpful comments on a similar post on my thread a while back I did try this. I turned off things one by one, and then in the end shut of everything at the consumer unit apart right hand side of the house sockets (making sure everything else was turned off on that ring). Unfortunately didn't appear to be coming from my house (internally at least).

I tried the radio test and do get noise on the 612khz frequency, however unfortunately I also pickup a foreign radio station on this frequency. However, around my house the radio broadcast was making a pulsating noise which reduced as I moved away from my house.

It's interesting because I thought that it was maybe the smart meters. However, the house in question with the CRT is very close to mine with the TV unit on the wall which effectively faces my smart meters, and the area where there is most noise.

I do apologise, I’d forgotten we’d spoken about this before.

Is it possible to have your neighbour unplug the telly for a couple of hours ? Just for testing purposes ?

What your case does nicely demonstrate, is the great difficulty of accurately hunting such things.

I am sure that would be possible as my partner is very friendly with her. Would the noise margin increase immediately after turning the offending device off?

I do notice that when the noise margin drops it doesn't do it instantaneously (like the article seems to suggest their TV did) but drops 0.1-0.2db every 10 seconds or so linearly down to c.2db. (refresh time of the stats page)

I’d suggest taking a ‘screenshot’ of all the router stats when it isn’t happening to start with ... to have baseline as such. Then have the suspect switched on at an agreed time and then watch the stats.

Some sources don’t kick straight in either, they need while ‘warm up’.

If you get a positive result .... low SNR, heavy corrected errors ... turn the suspect off again, see if things stabilise on the stats, then see if you can repeat the issue by switching it back on.

I believe you have said it doesn’t cause you any service affecting problems. More evidence that it might be nigh on impossible to locate.

like the article seems to suggest their TV did

I had read this as the faulty telly in the article was causing loss of sync to those nearby. Prompting my comment of why it took so long to find ... it being a fairly black and white case.