Saturday 24 February 2018

Life Without Broadband


A week ago my broadband service flickered a bit at 8.15am, died completely at 9, revived briefly at 11 then died again, taking the phone service with it. Remembering the procedure from times past, I dutifully removed the cover from the main OpenReach socket and plugged a phone into the test socket. Nothing.

I contacted my service provider, TalkTalk. “I've lost broadband and phone,” I explained. That was a mistake; I should have just said “I have no dialing tone at the master socket.”

“Is the power light on your router illuminated?”
“Yes, but I have no dialing tone at the master socket.”

“Is the broadband light on?”
“No, and I have no dialing tone at the master socket.”

“Please insert a pin in the router to reset it... Do you now have broadband?”
“No, but that's not surprising as I have no dialing tone at the master socket.”

I didn't believe it either!
“Do you have a spare router?”
“No, and I have no dialing tone at the master socket.”

You have to feel some empathy, I suppose. Probably most of the faults that get reported are traceable to wires falling out of routers or TVs, or grannies pressing the wrong buttons.

“Please stand by while I conduct a line check....”
Sounds hopeful..............
“There is no fault on your line. The problem is in your home.”
(Thinks...) “What?! You're joking.”

A further exchange of text messages failed to dissuade TalkTalk that the problem was not with my router.

One week later...

TalkTalk's Brightspark engineer – a friendly guy called John – presents himself at my door at 7am. I'd quite forgotten that such a time existed, but it does.
You have a problem with your router?”
No, There's no dialing tone at the master socket.”
(By now my loyal readers may be picking up a trend here.”)

John the Brightspark removes the cover from the OpenReach socket and plugs in his phone.
You need the Openreach engineer.”
Really?!!!!!!!!

So now,after that brief encounter of the First Kind with TalkTalk, I await OpenReach. I've been warned to prepare for a l.o.n.g wait.

How reliant I had become on Broadband! I've lost iPlayer (a great loss), Google Home has fallen silent and the only Internet access to my PC is achieved by tethering it to my mobile. Within 3 days I'd used up my data allowance and had to buy another £5.50s worth, so I certainly won't be trying to access anyone's byte-hungry photo albums for a while. Thankfully, TalkTalk are routing all my incoming calls to my mobile without charge, and these I can receive so long as I'm sitting in the right place in one of two rooms in my house where I get a mobile signal. Easy!

Faced with this mind-boggling interruption to my daily life, there really was only one thing to do. I rummaged through the dusty shelves of my book collection and extracted Agatha Christie's Sparkling Cyanide. Iris has found the note from her dead sister and is now being befriended by that sister's widower... a shady character if ever there was one.

Please don't tell me who done it.


Update 26th February
Broadband was mysteriously restored this evening, so 'proper' Internet access and digital TV are mine again.  I still have no phone dialing tone but can easily cope with that – mobile for occasional calls and Skype for longer ones. Indeed, I often wonder why we bother with a BT phone service at all. I'm now catching up on friends' Flickr updates and some nice photos of a new ukulele group.


3 comments:

  1. Angie
    Once you get back into reading you won't notice what you are missing.Good luck with the openreach engineer You would think that Talk Talk would have open reach engineers booked for this sort of occaision.
    Julliette

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  2. I stick with BT for my home broadband partly because it avoids having a middleman like Talk Talk between me and some proper attention, should anything go wrong, although it rarely does nowadays. (Well, that's tempting the gods!)

    I stopped using the landline for phone calls a few years ago, relying ever since on my mobile phone. I gather that more and more people are doing the same. It's no disadvantage at home, at least not where I am.

    In the caravan, the mobile phone - it's a smartphone of course (i.e. a little computer) - has to do almost everything, including iPlayer if the local 4G is good enough. My phone's large screen is for occasional catch-up TV, as well as for displaying photos.

    How are you doing in the snow? Another communication blackout?

    Lucy

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  3. It's the convenience of having 3 landline phones in the house that scores for us; there's one in the lounge, one in my office/hobby room and one upstairs in the bedroom. I draw the line at taking my mobile from room to room, and you can be sure that when the darned thing rings I'll be at the opposite end of the house. Added to that, the mobile signal here is not great. My Vodafone scores over S's O2, but it still seems to be dependant on the weather, or perhaps the phase of the moon.

    We had a light dusting of snow yesterday afternoon, though not enough to inspire me to venture into the freezing outdoors and photograph it. Heavier falls are forecast for Thursday-Friday.

    Angie

    ReplyDelete