Call off the search parties, I'm back.

[Peripheral]

Wednesday 29 th December, the internet deserted us. Ten minutes later it came back. One hour later it went off again but this time it stayed off. We thought that our broadband provider was having problems. After two hours we were still devoid of the broadband. We contacted them and told them that we could not get online. They did some phone related tests and told us that we had a fault. We were told that they would send a new router and update our broadband and carry out more tests. We were also told that they would send us an email explaining what they were going to do. ??????
"Err excuse me" said I, "How are you going to send me an email with all the details on? The bloody internet isn't working".
L O N G P A U S E..... " OH, you will get the email when we have sorted out your problem and got you back online".
Maybe it would be incorrect to divulge the name of our broadband provider but, a little clue shouldn't cause any problems. If you go outside and look upwards you may see some clouds. Beyond those you will see something coloured blue. That is the clue. We were without the internet for eight days. EIGHT DAYS!!!!!! ...Being disabled we rely on that to order our food etc. We had a lady call from our provider to solve the problem but she didn't know what was wrong. She arranged for OPEN REACH to call and restore the internet. They came this morning, Wednesday 5 th, January. Two hours later we were back online and so, here I am, broken heart-ed. Why 'so sad' I hear you say. Well, there were no search parties to see what fate I may have succumbed to. We passed the internetless time fighting. Victoria won 7 days out of 8. I will seek my revenge when I've had my head stuck back on. One more thing, HAPPY NEW YEAR.

P.S.The bloke from OPEN REACH who came to restore our internet, lives, ..............in the next street. He used to deliver newspapers here.

 

[captain clutterbuck]

Nice to have you back Peri Can I ask how Victoria's recovery is progressing well I hope . Does your TV Service come from BT and was that impacted . Hopefully you were not reduced to returning to days of yore and had to listen to the Radio, back to the days of ITMA. Much Binding in the Marsh, Men from the Ministry , Dick Barton Special Agent and Woman's Hour.

 

[maltrab]

Sometimes it can be a simple case of a engineer visiting a cabinet and he either knocks your circuit or has the wrong information and steals your circuit/wires for someone else.
What often happens and annoys me they try and claim the fault is within your property and put you off by saying if we come out it will be hundreds of pounds if the fault is within your home, 99.9% of the faults are never within the property, I have known folk in their 80's being asked to unplug the faceplate on the master socket, so they can test again without the house wiring plugged in, often the access to these sockets are behind something and low level, they then make a appointment, never turn up but by some miracle the fault is fixed, they should turn up as the person could still be stuck on the floor with a screwdriver in their hand

 

[Peripheral]

Nice to have you back Peri Can I ask how Victoria's recovery is progressing well I hope . Does your TV Service come from BT and was that impacted . Hopefully you were not reduced to returning to days of yore and had to listen to the Radio, back to the days of ITMA. Much Binding in the Marsh, Men from the Ministry , Dick Barton Special Agent and Woman's Hour.

Hi Captain, Victoria has recovered from her fall but is still very amputated. She feels cut off from everybody . OOPS, I meant to put disabled.
We get everything through Sky. We used to have BT but their service is rubbish. Took me a long time to get rid of them. Our neighbour has a relation who lost the internet on Dec 1st and, as yet, has still not got the service back.
That's almost six weeks without the internet. He works from home and needs the net. Are you with BT Captain?

 

[maltrab]

Hi Captain, Victoria has recovered from her fall but is still very amputated. She feels cut off from everybody . OOPS, I meant to put disabled.
We get everything through Sky. We used to have BT but their service is rubbish. Took me a long time to get rid of them. Our neighbour has a relation who lost the internet on Dec 1st and, as yet, has still not got the service back.
That's almost six weeks without the internet. He works from home and needs the net. Are you with BT Captain?

Unless you have a private company running fibre to your home, then most companies, other than Virgin,which is owned by foreign companies these days, rely on openreach's wires for telephone and broadband. Much depends on your providers relationship with openreach, most providers run a call centre, which when you call whoever you get to speak to will work from a script and have little or no technical understanding of what the problem might be, these days a smaller provider can be much better at sorting your problems out.

One of the best in the market is a company called Andrews and Arnold https://www.aa.net.uk, they are the best in the business, my daughter had problems with her BT line cutting off regularly, though engineers did attend and swapped out cables etc, the fault remained and after 12 months BT had not resolved the issue, she was then out of contract and joined A&A, they kept a 24/7 log of the circuit, and within a week got BT to replace a mux in the cabinet, problem solved, the only real issue with A&A is they are not the cheapest for broadband etc, but you get what you pay for, the number 2 in the charts is Zen with a more realistic prices https://www.zen.co.uk/. I am with idnet which is a reseller of Zen https://www.idnet.com/, the reason I use them is they offer naked broadband, so no telephone number provided, which suits me as I have used VOIP for many years and glad to get rid of the landline number, which saved me £8 a month and no spam phone calls. With A&A and idnet you have to provide your own router, with Zen they provide a Fritzbox router with VOIP capability built in.

In the next few years analogue telephone numbers will cease, many more home will have fibre to the home and VOIP will become the norm for calls in and out, or the younger generation will just use their mobiles for calls and when and if 5G rolls out to a much larger footprint, you could use a 5G router for you broadband or maybe Starlink if you cannot get a decent service from land based infrastructure.

 

[captain clutterbuck]

Peri I am with Virgin mainly for the higher capacity broadband available , I could opt for Zen, always top of Which survey of Broadband suppliers, but whilst they can supply to me, the speed doesn't match that I get from Virgin however, it is competitively priced.

 

[Marianna]

Sometimes it can be a simple case of a engineer visiting a cabinet and he either knocks your circuit or has the wrong information and steals your circuit/wires for someone else.
What often happens and annoys me they try and claim the fault is within your property and put you off by saying if we come out it will be hundreds of pounds if the fault is within your home, 99.9% of the faults are never within the property, I have known folk in their 80's being asked to unplug the faceplate on the master socket, so they can test again without the house wiring plugged in, often the access to these sockets are behind something and low level, they then make a appointment, never turn up but by some miracle the fault is fixed, they should turn up as the person could still be stuck on the floor with a screwdriver in their hand

I had a tech get very snarky about claiming that the fault was on my property. After a great deal of claiming this, that, and the other, he finally went outside and checked the wire the runs along the street. Sure enough, he found that a squirrel had bitten through the insulation, exposing the wire. He replaced the cable and tucked it under the phone wire so the next squirrel needing to wear down his front teeth would bite through the insulation and put the neighbors' phone out, instead.