Posted: 14th Mar, 2008 By: MarkJ
BT claims to have fixed an entire neighbourhoods broadband connection problems by buying just one of its customers a new Television (TV). Disruptive interference from electrical appliances is nothing new; it's been an issue with ADSL connections since day one but rarely to this kind of scale:
"We've seen faulty set-top boxes that have caused lots of problems," said Ashley Pickering of BT Wholesale's broadband access solutions team. "It's generally the power supply - a capacitor that's gone a bit leaky and started to emit more [electrical] noise than it used to. A slightly faulty power supply in a television can degrade the performance of your line."
And it's not only your connection that suffers, as BT found recently. "There was a faulty television affecting broadband services in a 200m radius," Pickering claimed. "Lots of people in that neighbourhood were experiencing connection problems because of one person in that area."
PC Pro's fascinating article notes that BT certainly doesn't intend to go around buying us all new bits of consumer kit, not that we wouldn't mind :). Instead the operator is planning to introduce its own £10 filtered faceplate, which will slot into the master telephone socket and improve performance by limiting interference.
Filtered face plates are not new and adopting one can indeed improve broadband performance, as has been discussed and suggested numerous times before. One example can be found in our ADSL Connection Tips article from last year:
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/articles/adsltips/01.shtml