En-Tee Hell, fit the first
In which our hero re-discovers early 1990s communications, but considers it against the weigh of his wallet.
Our internet connection has been at best intermittent for the last two days. The cable modem will link for anything between a couple of seconds and a couple of minutes, then the route will vanish and so will connectivity. I am pretty sure that it is not any of the kit at our end. The wireless connection between my portable and the router is rock solid. The cable modem itself seems to be fine, although the uplink light keeps flashing orange. No, the problem is likely to be in the street or beyond.
In practical terms, this means that I am hitting the "Try Again" button in Firefox and the "Get Mail" button in Thunderbird quite a lot. I am loathe to report the problem though. It may highlight the fact that we have not been billed for connectivity for some months. Sometimes it pays to keep quiet and hope that it will sort itself out.
Oh readers, I know that you are disappointed in my lack of honesty. I swear to you that Simon and I lie awake in a sweat, worrying about it. We pillory ourselves at regular intervals in the hope of redemption. We... Bollocks to that, we do nothing of the sort. We’ve always paid the bills when they were presented; there are direct debits in place to deal with them. They have just stopped asking. So sod them.
Comments
(originally received by email and posted on behalf of John)
See, it was that that pushed me over the edge, in my case...
The difference with my problem was that I had been paying them, they just hadn't linked the payment record with the cable modem, hence cutting me off every three months (no notice or warnings, naturally). Its entirely likely that you're seeing a 'you've not paid' cutoff of service at the cable modem account end, which may or may not be connected with your actual account with them, hence the issues.
Go to ADSL - I have and haven't looked back! Freedom 2 Surf offer an all you can eat 2MB connection for 19.99/month, Nildram get good reports, even BT only suck out of habit.. I bought a nifty wireless model with the f2s package because it had QOS features, but they would have given me one for free without wireless at the time...
These days you can move your phone to BT, your internet to xDSL, and keep NTL for TV, if you like, its not like the old days where you had to have all three...
Posted by: John C | June 17, 2006 2:49 AM