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Broadband Fault – The Davies Household Grinds to a Halt

I woke up this morning to a fault on my broadband line. OK this kind of thing happens. There is a BT engineer coming tomorrow morning to fix it. Fine.

It does however bring home how reliant we are on the internet. I found out in bed at 6.30 am that that the “internet wasn’t working” (after I had been down to make the tea!). My wife’s instant reaction was “OMG what if I get any emails from potential eBay buyers asking questions about my sales items”.

“Don’t worry” I said, “in an emergency you can use my phone”.

I did the usual routine of rebooting the router but to no avail. From my phone I sent an email in to one of our tech team leaders, who having reported it to BT called to say that they had identified a fault (see above).

Then my eldest son came back from his early morning swim (I used to do that many years ago – not any more). The next minute we heard him going into the attic – to reboot the router. His routine is swim then Facebook. Facebook isn’t really missioncritical but…

Next up was the youngest son who is now worried that he won’t get the email from the cricket selector telling him whether he has been picked for the Lincolnshire regional Under 10s. The fact that he game isn’t until 24th July is neither here nor there. He has been waiting for the email every day for a week. I even had to check whilst we were camping over the weekend.

Unfortunately the two youngest lads were unable to play their online games at the crack of dawn as is their usual wont. They probably had to stick to good old fashioned XBox without the connectivity! Oh no! Maybe even watch the TV?

My daughter was nowhere near surfacing so I can’t comment on any problems she might have without internet – it is the half term holidays after all.

I doubt whether we are any different to most families.

Even partial internet access, such as that I experienced over the weekend whilst camping with the kids’ Scout Group, doesn’t cut it. Poor GPRS coverage in the woods where we were staying meant struggling with Facebook updates, twitter, gmail and general Google searches for answers to quiz questions in the mess tent on Saturday night.

When I got home on Sunday the relief was two fold – firstly  the shower and change into clean clothes and secondly the good quality internet access in the house.

Whether we like it or not the internet has changed the way we live our lives for ever. We can’t do without it. It is in the same class as electricity, gas, water and petrol.  Take any of those items away and the country, quite worryingly, grinds to a halt.

It is going to get worse as the government intentionally moves more and more og our lives online. We have to somehow develop strategies for survival and in the first instance a dual technology solution that incorporates 3G is an obvious one.

I’d be interested in hearing others thoughts on this one.

PS I don’t know what my wife still finds to stick on eBay.  The house will soon be stripped bare:)

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

5 replies on “Broadband Fault – The Davies Household Grinds to a Halt”

can feel your pain mate! Totally agree, the internet is such a valuable part of our lives now, it is a utility really.
All the more reason to get access to the final third, so many people still on dial up. Did you try dial up btw? It wouldn’t hurt to be reminded LOL.
chris

Chris
It is so long since I used a dial up connection I would have no idea how to do it. Also I doubt whether I could lay my hands on the cable 🙂

That’s why I keep a Mobile Broadband service as my backup connection. I can’t tell you how useful it has been when the power goes out, my computer epic fails, the router implodes or my ISP’s radius server takes an unexpected afternoon nap.

I tried using dialup as a backup but these days it’s worse than useless.

You can see why we get so many enquiries for the new Cisco G series routers with the failover 3G card for our customers with remote endpoints on their PWANS, the 1841 seems to be making a b-line for our construction customers. Deano (Chief Technical Architect) has two on his window ledge in the office being put through their paces at the moment. Not long before the option of seamless DSL to 3G handover on failure becomes a standard request. Maybe we can give you one on Test & Eval Tref to help Mrs D is keeping the economy turning via ebay !

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