Select a region
If you were planning on doing your Christmas shopping online this year, it might be worth getting it sorted before putting up your tree.
Adorning your house with simple decorations such as fairy lights could cause lower broadband speeds, regulator Ofcom has warned.
According to the watchdog, wireless networks often suffer interference from electronic goods including baby monitors, microwave ovens and, heartbreakingly, fairy lights.
So Santa’s Grotto is presumably something of a Wi-Fi black hole, which goes some way to explaining why he still uses a sleigh rather than drones for delivery.
Up to six million homes and offices could improve their broadband connection as a result of this or the wireless network not being set up properly.
Ofcom is launching a new Wi-Fi app to test internet signals in homes and suggests ways to enhance it.
Ofcom also released research which found more than a quarter of homes in the UK have a “superfast” broadband connection of more than 30MB per second – an increase to 7.5 million households from six million last year.
But higher-speed broadband is available in fewer than two in five (37%) homes in rural areas, the regulator found.
And around 8% of households, around 2.4 million, cannot receive a connection with speeds of more than 10MB per second, a figure which rises to nearly half of houses in rural areas.
This was often caused by remote houses “lying further from the network’s local street cabinet or local telephone exchange”, Ofcom said.
