Friday 22 February 2019

We have internet again ...

Now I've already written elsewhere about our internet troubles, but I'm glad to say we're all fixed now.

It did mean that for a couple of days while we waited for the NBN man we were dependent on our 4g modem, but the speeds were quite usable as long as we didn't stream any content - you could probably run a pop up business on a Telstra 4G modem.

Well, the NBN man turned up when he said he would, listened to my story about the guys working in the street, agreed it was most likely a cable break, pulled out his reflectometer, and voila, there was a break at 33m.

So off he went, looked at the street wiring cabinet, and there it was - our cable was broken off. Quick re kroning job later and we were up and running - time to fix 10 minutes, something I found quite impressive.

Now we were up and running I could back up my last set of data from the project, upload my photos from Norfolk Island, sync things and I was away.

We also got our internet tv service back. And thereby hangs a tale.

Our internet tv box uses an antenna connection for all the free to air channels, which had meant that when the internet died we could still watch them via the box.

Unknown to us it had quietly downloaded a new version of the system before the internet broke, but because we'd never powercycled the box we were running on the previous version.

Now, we'd had a notice from the power company to say that during the week we were aways they would be turning off the power in the street to do some routine work. When we got back we had clocks to reset and so on, but what we didn't realise is that the internet tv box rebooted into automatic configuration mode for the new version of the software, and imediately hung because there was no internet.

Not good design. Ideally it should have a 'carry on without an internet connection mode', to deal with scenarios like this.

Fortunately I'd never disconnected our old hard disk video recorder, which had a separate connection, so we could watch free to air tv via that.

Still, everything's tickety boo now, but the next time I see a cable van in the in the street, I'm taking a picture in case there needs to be some followup ... 

No comments: