I made myself busy until just after 12:00 and then checked Zen’s alert page. It was still showing “12:00 estimated” but I thought it was worth trying my connection.

The quick way to do this, I have found, it to try loading the Bing Web browser on my phone. If the connection is good, this pops up instantly.

I tried it and it popped up instantly. I fired up the PC and it too connected. Why doesn’t Zen’s alerts indicate “Clear”? Perhaps the connection is not guaranteed secure yet? Time will tell. For now, though, my window in the world is open once more.

I have kept watch on Zen’s alerts as the estimated time of repair has moved from 9:45 to 11:00 and now to 12:00.

This comment appears in their latest update:

Our suppliers engineers have located a fault with some core hardware and are arranging for a replacement device to be sent to site.
No ETA is yet available for the replacement hardware.

This outage is beginning to rival those famously experienced by mobile phone customers of O2 and Three.

This will knock a dent in Zen’s hitherto splendid reputation.

Jeremy Corbyn has promised that if Labour wins the election, every home will receive a free fibre broadband connection. If nothing else, this shows what a central part of our lives the Internet has become. So much can be done with it and – increasingly – so much cannot be done without it.

If I needed to be reminded of this fact, a potent reminder hit me this morning in the form of a Zen outage. My connection is still down as I write this on my iPhone.

We have been “with” Zen for a number of years and have generally been happy with the quality of the service. We are still on copper, not fibre, but that suffices for our modest needs.

A complete outage is rare though not unheard of. When one happens, my iPhone serves, euphemistically speaking, as a lifeboat. With it I can check Zen’s alert page to find out whether the problem is at their end or mine and, if necessary, call Zen support. In the meantime, I can use my phone to surf the Web.

Nonetheless, because I spend so much time online and tend therefore to take an Internet connection for granted, an outage induces feelings of helplessness and despondency. I have to make an effort to be patient, not to keep turning the router off and on again and not to keep trying to make my computer connect.

It’s all very curious because when I first started using computers, the Internet had not yet been heard of. Your computer was a world in itself with no connections to anything else. Thinking about that now gives me slightly claustrophobic feelings!

The first opening into a connected world came with bulletin boards. A BBS was an ordinary desktop computer connected by a modem to the telephone system. With your computer and a modem of your own, you could dial up a BBS and interact with it. Most BBSs were single user, that is, they accepted only one caller at a time. Communication between callers was by means of messages left in the various “rooms” or forums on the BBS.

Despite the limitations, the BBS became very popular and some supported very lively communities. Eventually, a form of networking was developed which enabled people connected to one BBS to send messages via the network to other BBSs. Given the enthusiasm of “sysops” (short for system operators) and their callers, the BBS might have developed still further but it was not to be: the advent of the Internet killed the BBS.

For a few years I ran a BBS of my own and attracted a small but faithful following. From time to time, we would meet in person in a nearby pub and spend a companionable evening together.

Those days are gone, perhaps regretted in some ways and remembered fondly, but will never return. Instead, we have the Internet with its seemingly unlimited resources and ability to connect people all over the world.

Well, we do when our Internet connection is working, as mine is not just now.

So I will bestir myself and do what I should already have done, namely the morning chores, and perhaps by the time I have finished, the connection will have been restored and my “window on the world” will be open once more.

Afterthought

Would we be better off with a fibre connection? I’m not sure that we would. More importantly, however, I cannot avoid the notion that fibre is already old hat. Surely, the future is with universal wireless connectivity – isn’t that what the arrival of 5G is telling us?

You can already acquire a wireless router connecting via your mobile phone network that requires no wires (or fibre) and can be carried with you from place to place. I think that is where the future lies. Maybe someone should mention this to Jeremy.