Well That Was Not Fun

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.

Technology

- great when it works, not so great at other times. That being said I wouldn't be without it which is why my recent email problems have been and still are annoying me mightily. I've been unable to connect to my email for a fortnight now and it has been to say the least frustrating. I've had several very long sessions with very pleasant people who work for the ISP to no avail. The rest of the internet is working perfectly - well, as perfectly as it ever does here which more accurately can be summed up as adequately most of the time as long as it's during the day. The email however is not and we've now reached a point where I've have exhausted their free support and am expected to pay for fixing a problem they caused. (They blocked my email because they thought I'd been hacked. I hadn't been.) I've found a work around for now but that, while useful, is also time consuming and as a result I find myself checking in on it far less frequently than usual.

This has come up at a time when we're looking into connecting to the NBN, which has at long last come to our area, and is making me question whether I still want to stay with this company. We have been with them for some time and until now we've been happy with the service and had intended to stay with them. But this is the second time in a couple of months that they've cut me off  and then had problems reconnecting me. Don't get me wrong because I'm more than happy they are taking care of perceived security issues but the least I expect is that they should be able to restore it once it's been checked out or corrected. I also expect that fixing a problem they caused should be without cost to me. That's reasonable, isn't it.

So I'm looking around. There are a multitude of companies offering NBN services and the thing we really need to consider here - quite apart from cost which is obviously important - is that internet access and speed are functional. We live in a bit of a black spot for internet connectivity - something to do with our being on the edge of the areas covered by two different phone exchanges I'm told although whether that's true or just an excuse I have no idea. Honestly I don't care about the reason or reasons. What I want is a usable internet connection with reasonable speed that can be accessed at  different points in the house at any time, something that at present is variable at best during the day and after about 5 PM vanishes everywhere except when I'm sitting right next to the router.

So there's the problem. What the answer is I'm not sure yet but I've been hearing very good things about fixed wireless - and there's a local company which has been recommended to me by several of my neighbours. I've enquired and we are apparently in an excellent position to access this so I guess that's my next stop.