Falling off the Internet

We’ve been experiencing some connectivity issues at home with our BT broadband package. Every now and again connectivity will vanish all together for a period ranging from a few minutes to a few hours. This is a relatively new problem. There are a number of reasons why this is a bad thing but the most acute is the difficulties this presents us with when trying to run a business from home.

Diagnostics show that the failure is in the PPP connection from our router/modem to the BT server. The internal wireless intranet continues to work fine. This, coupled with the fact that BT are currently performing major works to the whole of their network until August this year and the fact that their recorded support line continues to offer the advice that some customers in some unnamed areas may experience some connectivity issues, leads me to believe that they are culpable.

So, after taking a call from an irate Mrs. England Project this morning, and after going through the usual list of things to try, I could only suggest the un-suggestible. Phoning support.

I know, I know, what a fool I am.

Anyhow, Mrs. England Project was on the phone for an hour before she managed to get through to a human being. The person she managed to talk to had difficulty understanding the problem because (honest truth) he was French. He had some significant holes in his understanding and expression of concepts structured around and conveyed in the verbal form of the English language. His eventual advice was that our router was not supported by BT and that we should hit the “access with a sharp object only” reset button. Our router? A BT Voyager 2100.

My good lady, being good, refused to hit the reset button and as a consequence she was 100% responsible for preventing the loss of our network’s port forwarding information, IP allocation settings and network encryption method and key. Stupid she ain’t.

After slamming the phone down it transpired that connectivity had returned all by itself. Oddly enough this is a remarkably similar scenario and outcome as to that suggested by the BT service line recorded message, leaving us none the wiser about how likely and at what rate such future outages might occur.

This rant was brought to you via a different provider.