Disconnected

I've only just got the internet connection back after a 6 day outage.

This time it took me 5 days to exhaust all of the possibilities for a fault at my end with the Indian call centre before I finally persuaded them to pass the case onto the "Escalation Team" i.e. the technical staff in the UK.

Went through a set of diagnostics, and a couple of router reboots, with a helpful chap last night, who then told me that someone would call this morning. At 11 am today a pleasant lady informed me that the technicians could not identify the fault, as the line test showed 'no fault' (as it has done on other occasions) and could only conclude that my router might be faulty. They have despatched a replacement router to me.

Just after this phone call I thought that I'd give my current router one last reboot - and it connected! Hmmmm.

I immediately rang the call centre and got them to update the case with this information.

So either the router has an intermittent fault, or (as I strongly suspect) it's a case of good old Orange or BT not admitting that they've screwed up something on the network again, and have quietly corrected it. It's notable that I seem to get these issues around, or just after a Bank Holiday.

My 12 month contract with Orange is now up, so I think that it's time to switch broadband suppliers. Might not make any difference if it's BT who's causing this, but at least I might get the same amount of frustration for a cheaper price :)