Broadband & Christmas Tree Lights

Hi, I'm Andrew Ferguson. On behalf of all of us here at thinkbroadband we'd like to wish you a Merry Christmas At this time of year we often see lots of reports of broadband slowing down. The Christmas season means that more people are at home with their families so broadband networks can be quite busy. But did you know that the problems sometimes are even closer to home than you think. If you have a broadband service delivered through a telephone line, and that means most services apart from *** Media cable services, you may find that at this time of year that your broadband slows down through radio interference or sometimes even completely cuts out for a few seconds The sources of this radio interference can be many different things. It can be TV's; it can be a boiler switching on and off it can be almost anything that is electrical. But one of the most common problems at this time of year is Christmas lights, particularly those where the lights are blinking There is a neat trick you can use to detect radio interference with your broadband and that's to use an AM radio. The reason that an AM radio is useful is because broadband and AM radio share the same set of frequencies. Although, of cause, you have to make sure it's not that a DAB radio because these use a complete different set of frequencies. To test this, switch your radio to the AM band and tune it to around 600 kHz. Try putting it next to an electrical circuit such as your light switch. Once this works put the radio close to or under your christmas tree. Then switch on your Christmas tree lights. If you can hear a difference in the static noise from the radio, it is possible that this will cause interference with your broadband signal, especially if your router is near or the the telephone line runs by the Christmas tree. We would recommend if possible that you avoid placing your Christmas tree and Christmas tree lights near to your broadband router or telephone line. Adjoining properties of course can also be another source of interference but generally as those are a few meters away from your own property, the chance of it causing problems are a lot less. We hope you find this tip useful and we look forward to giving you more advice over the next year on how to avoid broadband problems. And hopefully in years to come, once we have all switched to fully fiber-optic broadband connections, i.e. fiber to the home, this whole problem of radio interference on our broadband connections will completely vanish.