New and old

This morning was reserved for the installation of fibre optic broadband. The Openreach engineer turned up well within the scheduled time slot. I was a bit disappointed to discover that they weren’t able to use the existing cable path and we’d have to have a new hole drilled through the wall in a place that’s quite obvious when sat inside. But it turns out that the fibre optic installation is entirely separate.  It didn’t take too long install the new wall box and get the cable through.  At one point he had to go up the telegraph pole opposite and on a ladder in front of the house to bring the cable down. I was surprised that he worked alone while climbing to heights. So, there are two BT connection boxes on the front of the house. I assume the old one is entirely redundant now and will never be used again. I wonder how much unused cable there is around the country?

He was not able to tell us when the switchover would happen which meant that, even after the high speed installation, I was still using the old broadband for my calls until, about thirty minutes after he’d departed, the old connection cut out. This was mid way through a call so I had to scurry to reconnect to the new router but it was reasonably simple and I worked the rest of the day on a super high-speed connection.  When I tested the speed we were getting much more than we are paying for; I assume it will settle down to the paid for speed.

After work I began the long and tiresome process of reconnecting all the devices that need the Wi-Fi to the new router.  It was much more complex that I imagined with every system requiring me to figure out what to do and follow some strange sequences. We have a Sonos speaker system in the house and it took a long time for the system to take the update. I tried several times and got lots of frustrating errors with systems saying that they couldn’t connect. The most annoying was the video doorbell. I had to take it off the wall with all the fiddly screws - and repeatedly reset it. It would not take the update and, to make it more complex, a wire that’s part of the power connection in the wall box came disconnected and I had to work out how to fix that. There’s not a lot of give in the wires to try reconnecting,  In the end, I ignored all the online instructions and powered the device in the house which made the whole process work better. Which just left reconnecting it to the outside of the house.  After over an hour I finally was able to ring the bell. 

I really did wonder if a little bit extra broadband speed was worth the hassle.