Tuesday September 12, 2006

Six green leds....

The evening before we went on holiday - more on that tomorrow; I got home to find my SunRay at home was not working. My wife's home machine was also struggling to find its way on the internet. I did the usual turn everything off in sight including the ADSL router that for me showed a change in its usual bank of six green leds - one was orange. For me that difference was a potential source of the problem. I rang my ISP and eventually was advised it was a known exchange problem - although it was not mentioned when I rang the number to listen to known outages. I made a fatal mistake here ; I should insisted they did a line test and register the fault.

Of course a week later on our return the fault was still present. This time they did a line test and said my router was not in sync with the exchange - whatever that means.. They would escalate the fault and someone would be in touch with me in forty eight hours. Despite my protestations all I was left with at that point was a ticket number and the promise of that call. I left it for a couple of hours and rang back. I explained I had been sold a dummy a week ago and this is a business line and is forty eight hours really the best they could do ? This phone call resulted in a promise of an update within twenty four hours.

Within two hours of that call the router had its usual merry bank of six green leds on again and we are on the internet. Annoyingly the ISP did not ring back when this happened to claim victory over this technical gremlin. It made me think that we are all starting to treat internet acess like other utilities. Forty eight hours of lack of service of phone,electricity, water etc would be met with outright disgust but we are ( myself included ) starting to rely on internet service to function in our daily lives. Apart from catching up on work email that whole afternoon was punctuated with oh cannot do that the internet is down....