We've been without house internet access for nearly a month and the house phone which comes through our ISP has also been non-functional. This has meant I could only get on the internet via a Personal hot spot using my phone which is not ideal. It chews up data and I only have a small amount of data on my phone - I've had to go to a higher and more expensive plan just to do the essentials like the grocery shopping and to see if I could find anything that might help. I've tried everything I could think of as well as every suggestion I could find on the internet. Nothing helped.
No-one seemed to know what was actually causing the problem. Our ISP checked our router - and said it was working perfectly. They contacted the NBN (the National Broadband Network) and technician spent some hours putting temporary patches on their cables. This is because we are on the aging copper wire system that should have been fully replaced when the NB came into being - I won't go into the details of why this didn't happen except to say it became a political football. This system is starting to fail and there's now a rush on to retrofit it with the modern fibre system but with so much to be replaced we have to wait our turn hence the temporary patches.
Unfortunately none of this helped us. But then - after nearly three weeks of being sent back and forth between the two companies - with the help of a very patient man from my ISP - I had the internet. We were on the phone for over two hours trying one fix after another. As I can't see very well these days I had to get Pisces, who is a complete computer illiterate, to read things out and which led to some interesting moments. We got there in the end, thank goodness. Phew. Then the next morning we discovered our phone was out again and the internet was gone - again.
Since then - after another marathon session with a technician lasting nearly three hours - we have now had working internet and a phone for a few days without any outages. The only problem was that now my airPrint printer still didn't work. You'd think it would have been fairly simple just set it up again but no. I tried and tried before giving in and calling support. The guy was initially helpful but when he couldn't get it to work - and to be fair we'd been on the phone for over an hour at the time - he told me that I should get in touch with my ISP to check my router password. Not helpful because I knew I had the correct password.
As I scrolled through the website totally frustrated another number came up as the company contact. I took a deep breath, tried it - and success! A very helpful woman worked through the problem with me and finally - finally everything was back in working order. Yay!
This is why I'm at last able to blog - I didn't forget you . Truly. I worked out that altogether during that month I spent close to fifteen - yes, 15 - hours trying to get the whole mess sorted. So far it's back and I have everything possible crossed that it stays that way.
