Harry’s World

About two months ago the TV blew up. We got another and put it on the stand. It worked well.

At about the same time the broadband dropped from a reasonable 3.5mbps (technically it is upto 8mbps) to a barely broadband 0.5mbps. BT were called.

After much diagnosing and repeated calls it was no better. BT’s technical support was very polite but ultimately not very useful. Although on about the fifth call they checked the line and found a fault (although, I reckon they could check any line in the country and find a problem with it).

I did some research and discovered that a possible problem was radio interference. So, I got an AM radio (if you are young you will not know what I am on about) and tuned it to (as accurately as the dial would allow) 612khz. I then proceeded to wave it around the broadband router and wires.

It seems that the Sky box, especially from the rear, chucks out a whole bunch of radio interference in the 100s of khz band (which is exactly the range of frequencies ADSL uses). A suitable bit of relocating of wires to be as far away from the Sky box as possible and all is now well… back up to 3.5mbps.

I guess when we put the “new” TV on the stand some of the cables got moved (my wife just had to hoover behind the TV stand).

Tempted to get a shielded ADSL cable - maybe it can go even quicker!!