As you may already know, Christmas and New Years can be terrible for SMS and telephone communications due to the major congestion of people sending each other greetings but who knew that Christmas lights could be responsible for slowing down your broadband.
Apparently, Christmas lights can interfere with the speed of your broadband connections and as gadgets are increasing in use the disruption is becoming more noticeable. Several internet providers have received complaints due to the slowing down of people’s broadband.
Senior Manager at Talk Talk, Sylvain Thevenot, said:
A significant percentage of these complaints were due to interference from Christmas lights. Our past experience has shown that in-home lighting and wiring, such as Christmas tree lights, can interfere with wireless signals and reduce broadband speeds regardless of internet service provider by up to 25%. We estimate that this problem could affect thousands of broadband users this coming Christmas. Although, it might sound silly, interference from domestic lighting and wiring is a major problem across the industry, and at this time of year Christmas lights tend to aggravate it. We recommend people avoid having their light flashing as in some cases this can interfere with the wireless connection.
I should make it clear at this point that this is a quite uncommon occurrence and as said above Christmas tends to be the worst for broadband speed in relation to lights.