Red Light

Complete C*** Up. That red light on the router top left announced the end of our telephone and Internet connection.  

After four years of having German Telekom (equivalent of UKs British Telecom) the one & only operator of telephone services until privatisation swept through the European telecommunications industry in the 80s, I decided to change suppliers. For the first years was required to use them as they laid the the Glassfiber, Gigabit, high speed cables to our house for free. Although the cost was actually paid for by EU/Bavarian State as part of a program to connect far outlying properties that otherwise would never make commercial business sense to lay cables. 

In retrospect it was silly of me to cancel the contract, for the official last day, myself. I should have got a new supplier to do it. However the constant telephone terror of Telekom's sales people in the months before had so annoyed me that I did it simply to shut them down.

I did get a new supplier two weeks before the change day and the sales person assured me they would manage a seamless change. Sales people aren't necessarily good technical people.

At midnight the line was cut off by Telekom but I wasn't worried as both parties had informed me a Telekom  engineer would be coming by this morning to change some bit of equipment and all would be well. He came, pulled out a wire, put a sticker on an existing box, tweaked something on a laptop & left after 5 minutes saying I'd get an email shortly with the new log in data.

Naturally I didn't. Posting this a week later I can report we still haven't got a telephone line, no Internet and hours have been wasted, nerves are shredded and the situation won't be corrected until 19th March.

We haven't really got too much of our house connected, but still amazing quite how much there is - PV control, hot water immersiion heater, EV loading, Alexa, TV, lighting control, security cameras.....

Had I not simply cancelled but got the new company to do it on my behalf, then Telekom could not legally have disconnected the service before the new operator took over. Both I and the new provider begged Telekom to restore the service just for the couple of weeks but they flatly refused unless I signed a new 2-year contract with them! And they own the cables, so not much one can do.