The next time you can’t get your cell phone’s network to cooperate, perhaps check on that humming fridge in the garage, keeping beers and other beverages chilly. A town Down Under learned that a simple beer fridge, dedicated to backyard tippling and warm weather drinking, had the power to take out an entire mobile network with just a few freak electric signals.

Australia’ Herald Sun says it took a team of investigators using “software robots” from the Telstra mobile network to hunt down the cause of a network blackout that affected several neighborhoods near a town.

All that technological investigating detected defective electric waves that were interfering with nearby network cells, and led back to a rogue beer fridge in one man’s garage. Gotta keep those cold ones chilly because everyone knows a one that isn’t cold is scarcely a one at all (please watch this video for reference, and enjoy).

One black-spot detector who knows his stuff said the special antennas are able to track the interference down to an address.

“You then knock on the door to see if you can check what is creating the interference,” he said.

The man living there was a bit surprised, to say the least, that his humble fridge was the cause of such a widespread outage.

“I’m amazed something like that could knock out part of the network,” he said. “You’re certainly going to stop and wonder. I’m going to run and see if my fridge is all right next time there’s a problem with the network.”

Fridge fault causes Telstra mobile network blackouts [Herald Sun]

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