Telco dramas

It's hard to believe but we haven't had any telecommunications in this house since the afternoon of July 18.  Our landline and DSL were just restored yesterday.  That's almost 5 days.  What happened?  So, I'm on my iMac and suddenly last Wednesday afternoon my DSL line goes down. Yep, restart the router, isolation tests etc etc.  No joy.  Must be my ISP?  But there's nothing on their website to indicate a fault in my area. Yes, luckily we still have the trusty iPhone to connect via 3G.  Mmmm.  Ok, well I don't care so much so I'll switch everything off and leave it till the morning.

In the morning, nothing.  And my wireless home network is not even available.  I plug my laptop into my router via ethernet and discover my router has lost all of its settings. What?  OK, log a call with my telco.  To cut to the chase, via a process of elimination we realise our landline is suddenly a different number.  In fact, it's my neighbour's number I found out later.  So sure, the phone is working, but we don't own that phone number.....All this took days to resolve.  So then they fixed my neighbour's problem (that's also our problem) and disconnected our line altogether.  In fact they cut it - yep, cut that is, with a cutting tool.  The cable.  This had to be fixed at a junction box about 500 metres from our house!  Crikey, this has been really annoying.  So now I've had to reconfigure the router, which is finally OK and all our connections are back.  I actually backed up the router which I had never done before but highly recommend!  Now I can finally relax and get back into the real world.

During this period of non-connectivity, we used the iPhone as a personal hotspot with both the iMac and my Lenovo laptop. I'd never had to do this before and it worked a treat.  I love my iPhone.