Those who have read any of my earlier posts on the topic will be able to guess how it ends, but here goes anyway.
Over the past couple of months, my broadband had slowed down more and more, the router needed to be turned off and on again nearly every time I wanted to log on etc, so I decided to bite the bullet and give Virgin NTL a call. The automated message told me that there were no problems recorded in my area but that because of problems elsewhere, their engineers were very busy and you'd have to wait for at least an hour before calls would be answered. Fair enough.
So I tried again the next day and got through after about twenty minutes. I told them that I suspected it was their router itself (the little black box on my desk) which had died a death after three years, they checked the connection from their end and told me there were no problems up to the junction box (which I knew anyway, as they replaced/refurbished this about a year ago).
We'll need to send out an engineer, the man said, we've got a slot tomorrow morning between 8 and 12 and another one in a couple of days' time. I asked if they could send him round the next morning, so far so good. I'd pencilled in a nice lie-in until he turned up, but as per usual the engineer turned up at quarter past eight on the dot, he mucked about for a few minutes, plugged in a new router, tested it, and then we logged back on and it all worked tip top fine again.
The old router only had one out-socket, so to get wireless in the house (my wife and daughter prefer wireless to cables) I used to have to then connect it to a wireless splitter/connector thingy, which added to the faff when you needed to 'turn it all off and turn it on again'. They cost about £80 each and none of them lasted much longer than a year.
The new router also has four out-sockets and built in wireless, which is password protected (so my neighbours can't use it for free). So I am a tiny bit miffed that they didn't send me a new wireless router as a matter of course, which would have saved me a couple of hundred quid over the years, but apart from that, I've absolutely nothing to complain about.
I normally give their engineers a tenner, this particular chap had to make do with a fiver because that was all I had on me at the time.
A simple solution
1 hour ago
22 comments:
OTOH,
El Reg
Bah, humbug! Virgin Media censors Charles D**kens
VFTS, but that's their cable telly department which is of no interest to me in the slightest. I'm a Freeview man myself.
Your routers only last a year! Excepting lightning damage and other 'spikes' all mine have lasted for yonks.
Weirdly my work broadband is 'too fast' and exceeds the maximum to which most routers are set, and this sometimes casues it to hang. But I'd rather have the quick bb and an occasional router issue than slower bb.
I grew a beard while waiting to talk to a human being at Virgin.
L, there's something funny about the electrics in this house. In three years we have got through one telly, one hifi, several freeview boxes, DVD and video players, two toasters, one kettle and one microwave. And about three wireless routers. That's more than we trashed in ten or eleven years at our previous house.
Anon, sorry to hear that. Maybe I've just been lucky over the past ten years. Or possibly my beard doesn't grow very fast?
MW You must be getting spikes of some form. In the dim and distant I worked in an office where the pbx kept blowing. Eventually traced to a dodgy rheostat in a storage heater in the Bank next door.
L, it must be something like that, but what do I do about it in practical terms? Ask the landlord to have the house rewired?
Maybe your landlord has a deal with Comet.
AKH, I actually sniggered at that comment.
MW - It's probably not the wiring per se. It'll be something causing a surge or spike. May not even be in your house. Do you have a RCCB consumer unit or is it a cartridge fuse type?
L: "RCCB consumer unit or is it a cartridge fuse type?"
I'm afraid I don't have the foggiest what either of those are, let alone which one we have, if any :-(
It's just a white box labelled 'Power Breaker' with a whole row of nine little red buttons which you can press back in if a fuse blows (which seldom happens).
Why not get a surge protector thingy?
MW - You've got an RCCB box, which makes things more puzzling.
D, go on, what's one of those? How much do they cost to have installed?
L, more puzzling for you, but not for me :-)
CJN, thanks for the extra info. So basically I'd need to kit out every socket with one of these, and then wait and see whether our run of bad luck comes to an end?
MW Surge protectors best for 'puters and related kit. WE have them on all our workstations and on our servers we have proper UPS's (uninterruptable power supply) units. These have batteries as well as surge protection so if you get a power cut you can either shut your stuff down safely or if a short outage your stuff just keep running. But CJN is right, basic surge protection is important.
MW,
Maybe not *every* socket. Certainly I'd start with the expensive and/or vulnerable stuff.
EG with what I have I'd look at the desk in front of me. PC, monitor 1, monitor 2, printer, broadband thingy, speakers. A good £800-plus, and if I had a track record of things blowing, I'd say it was worth getting a £15 6-socket surge protector.
Next socket along: just a reading lamp, cost of a bulb about £1, cost of a 4-way surge protector £10, probably not worth it. Unless it was blowing every week, in which case it could be worth it just to avoid the inconvenience.
A UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) as mentioned by Lola is a battery that powers your machine and is topped up by the mains. It will filter out any surges, and if the mains goes off it will give you an hour or two of running, then tell your PC to shut down gracefully. It will cost quite a lot more, and is generally uneconomic for a small home office in the UK.
It's just a matter of weighing up the risk and the cost for each case, each on on its merits.
"which is password protected (so my neighbours can't use it for free)"
Is this really a problem in these days of unlimited download? Surely the main point of passwords is to stop people logging onto your wireless and nicking confidential information.
CJN, aha, this is starting to make sense, I note that my computer etc IS plugged into a 6-way socket proudly labelled "SurgeMaster" with a green and an orange light. Maybe that's why my computer itself hasn't broken, but the wireless routers were plugged into a common or garden extension lead.
I suppose I should plug the SurgeMaster into the wall socket and then plug common or garden one into the SurgeMaster rather than the other way round (as it is at present).
B, I've no idea whether it matters either way. I could never be bothered to set up password protection on the other ones but with the new box, it is compulsory, so that saves me the bother of actively deciding to do nothing.
I can't believe you paid £80 for that, you can get them for £20 nowadays. Maybe £50 10 years ago.
Anon, I have bought three wireless routers with 4 out sockets over the past few years from Maplins on Strand, London. From memory, the cheapest was £45 and the most expensive £80.
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