Help! My Broadband Is Sick And No-One Will Listen 8-(

Over the past few weeks or so I’ve been having major grief with my cable broadband connection. It would fail periodically for no apparent reason. A quick re-boot of the cable modem would soon sort this out and I’d be back on-line within a couple of minutes. However, in the last week things have become much worse, with failure arriving every 20 minutes or so. This increase in frequency appears to be linked the heat wave we are currently experiencing. It always goes when I’m right in the middle of writing a blog or up-loading photos to one of my many websites. Quite frankly it’s driving me round the bend.

Last Friday evening I final decided to ring my ISP to complain and suggested that the modem is probably on its last legs. After explaining this in quite technical detail to the engineer, he asked me to re-boot the modem yet again. I decided to humour him and closely followed the instructions, which he appeared to be reading off a pre-written training list. I was quite amused by his request to remove all the connections one-by-one while the power was off. Quite what this would have achieved was beyond me.

Once all the silly ‘following the script’ procedure was over, all was well. I pointed out to him that I had already explained that I have done the same thing every 20 minutes for the past fortnight, but it still fails again as regular as clockwork. His reply was ‘Is it working now?’. ‘Of course it is, I already explained that it would be working after a re-boot. It will fail again in 20 minutes time’. ‘But it’s OK now?’ he replied. ‘Yes’ I said. ‘Well my work is done then. Can I help you with anything else?’ said he. ‘Yes. Send me a new modem please. This one has an intermittent fault’ said I. ‘But it’s OK now, isn’t it?’.

I just gave up and made the decision to phone him back every 20 minutes, when it failed and complain until I got my message across. However, this week I have been to busy to make his life hell. Maybe next week.

Before you make a decision about my conduct in this matter, I would like to make it clear that I’m a professional engineer in industrial control systems and I do know a failed piece of equipment when I see it.

I’m not just a whinging consumer.
I’m a whingeing consumer with hands-on experience with
very similar equipment.

Here endith the whinge.

Regards



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