My telephone and internet connections have been the bane of my life since coming to the Dordogne. And now they are at it again – not working I mean.<\/p>\n
It started yesterday morning, a day or so after the brief but violent thunderstorm that we had a couple of evenings ago. I was checking up on the forums, news and my email on my laptop and my connection was running so slowly that in the end I decided that I’d try rebooting my modem to see if that would improve matters. But it didn’t. Instead I lost my connection completely, which means that I lost not just the internet but also my home phone service.<\/p>\n
But this time I didn’t have to flounder around like a beached walrus – I just grabbed my new smartphone, switched on my mobile hot-spot and I was back in business. OK, the system isn’t running fast enough to run services like YouTube* – but then again my normal home internet doesn’t either – but it’s quite adequate for normal browsing and email. And, of course, people can still get me on my mobile.<\/p>\n
There’s an argument for doing away with my home phone and internet connection completely if the 4G system down here was a bit faster but it’s too late for that now as I’ve got a contract for the next 18 months. But I’ll see what things are like at the end of it. In the meantime, as my connection still hadn’t been restored by yesterday evening, I went into the Free.fr fault reporting system.<\/p>\n
I always get very annoyed how these systems always imply that the fault is at the customer’s end, but I bit the bullet and went through it ticking the boxes confirming that yes, the cable was connected and no, I hadn’t done anything to damage the connection. What utter rubbish, as in my experience it’s always the system infrastructure or the modem that they supplied that’s the cause of the problem.<\/p>\n
So now I’m just back to waiting for things to happen. My guess is that my service won’t be restored until at least Wednesday of next week – that’s fast for down here – but at least I’ll have my smartphone tethered to my laptop in the meantime and won’t be totally cut off as I have been in the past.<\/p>\n
* A quick footnote – it’s actually running YouTube brilliantly this morning, faster than my home internet usually does, with no buffering. Why are these systems so ruddy variable?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My telephone and internet connections have been the bane of my life since coming to the Dordogne. And now they are at it again – not working I mean. It started yesterday morning, a day or so after the brief but violent thunderstorm that we had a couple of evenings ago. I was checking up … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9647"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9654,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9647\/revisions\/9654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}