(For the context of this post, see the previous two posts.)

By late afternoon, the outage suffered by Zen seemed have have been dealt with though any hopes that with the return of service the new router would start working proved futile. “No Internet Connection” continued to be the mantra of the day.

Once again, I called Zen support. I found myself at number 7 in the queue but hung on grimly. My patience was rewarded when, at 4:36 pm, a human answered the phone. That phone call was to last 1 hour and 15 minutes.

Having checked that I had indeed set up the router properly, using the cables supplied, the support person had me log on to the router and go into the settings. There ensued a long session during which I alternated sitting at the computer changing settings in the router with dashing across to the router to check what it was doing, to press buttons or to unplug and plug in cables. I will not bore you by explaining in detail what we did. Suffice it to say that we did it not once but several times and that each attempt ended in failure.

At the end of the hour and a quarter the verdict was that it would need an egineer to call at the flat and deal with the recalcitrant router hands-on. I await a phone call or email informing me of the time of the visit, which will probably occur tomorrow.

It’s disappointing that the day has ended without a resolution of the problem. I am not allowing myself to be optimistic about tomorrow, either. Let’s just wait and see.

In the meantime, we can access the Internet by using our iPhone hotspots so we are not cut off. (You wouldn’t want to see my mobile phone bill, though!)

I await with interest the final outcome of this strange saga.

As explained in my previous post, I was expecting delivery of a new router from our Internet service provider, Zen. The package was timed to arrive between 11:29 and 12:29 and it did indeed reach me within that hour.

I opened the box and carefully took out the router, the cables and other bits together with the all-important instruction sheet.

The FRITZ!Box 7530

As you can see from the above picture, the router is a FRITZ!Box 7530. Perhaps that means something to the technobuffs among you but to me it is just a name and number.

While I would never describe myself as a techical whizz, I do reckon that I can follow simple instructions and the instructions that came with the router were simple indeed. They included diagrams showing the different cables with their names and the different ports of the router, also named.

There was a “microfilter”, a small device that plugs into the telephone socket and has two ports, one for the telephone and the other for the router’s DSL cable. I plugged it in and attached the phone and the DSL cable.

Next is to plug the other end of the of the DSL cable into the router (“The first port on the left,” said the instructions, helpfully).

Now plug the power cable into the power socket and its other end into the router. (It goes into the only round socket on the router so no chance of mistakes there!)

“Now go and make a cup ot tea,” said the instructions. Pardon? I read it again: yes, I was definitely instructed to go and make a cup of tea! This is so that I will leave the router alone for the 5 to 10 minutes that it needs to set itself up and call Zen.

I didn’t actually make a cup of tea as I was too excited to find out if the thing worked. I did, though, wait for 10 minutes before proceeding.

Having made sure that the Power/DSL light and the WLAN lights are showing, open the computer’s wifi window, look for the item “FRTIZ!Box 7530” and click on it. A window opens for you to type in the 20-digit passcode. I did so and clicked “Next”.

“Connected,” said the PC. However, you should not believe everything the computer tells you and this was a case in point for when I clicked on an URL in my browser… nothing happened. Firefox remained ominously quiet for a while and then flashed up the message “Sorry, that page cannot be found”.

I tried seversal times, all to no avail and then I thought to test the connection on my phone. I typed in the 20-digit passcode and… nothing. After a while, though, the iPhone did display a helpful message: in orange characters, this read “No Internet Connection”.

At this point, I decided that there was but one thing left to do: phone Zen. Doing so revealed what I hope is the source of the problem: before even putting me through to a human, Zen’s recorded voice informed me that there was a general outage and all services were down. All being well, then, my router’s failure to connect me to the Internet is not a problem with the router itself or my ineptitude, but caused by the outage. When I did manage to speak to a human, she suggested I call again if I could not connect by late afternoon.

At the time of writing (3:21 pm) there is still “No Internet Connection” and I am left in the awkward position of not knowing whether the failure to connect is owing to the outage or to some problem at my end.

I will post a further note when the matter is finally resolved.

Our Internet service provider (ISP) is Zen and we have been “with” Zen for a good many years now. As ISPs go, Zen has a very good reputation and scores highly in customer satisfaction polls.

We joined Zen before fibre came along and we are still on what they quaintly call a “legacy tariff”, that is, DSL over the copper telephone wires. For this we pay what is increasingly coming to look like a peppercorn rent. In fact, that type of connection is no longer supplied by Zen to new customers. Though it is slow by today’s standards, it has always suited our modest needs – or, at least, it did so until recently.

With the arrival of the pandemic and the imposition of lockdowns, we found that our Internet connection was going slow. Sometimes it ran as it always had but then it would slow down and there would be delays before it started moving again. In the evening, we often watch a video, “streaming” it from one of the online providers. We frequently found that we had to disconnect from the Wifi and instead use the hotspot on Tigger’s phone which gave a faster and more reliable connection on which to watch the video.

We at first put this down to the effects of the pandemic and the fact that there were now many people working from home, increasing the traffic on the Internet to unprecedented levels. At the same time, though, I did vaguely wonder whether the router was at fault. We had bought this ourselves (our third router) in December 2018.

Thus matters stood until, out of the blue, I received an email inviting me to rate Zen, and my likelihood of recommending them to others, on a scale of 0 to 10. After careful thought, I gave it a score of 4. As a reason for the low score, I wrote about the slowness and the delays we were experiencing.

As this was a general email survey, I didn’t expect to hear further and was therefore startled to receive a phone call on Monday afternoon from Zen. They had read my criticism and apparently taken it to heart. There folowed a long discussion about why our connection was so bad and what could be done about it. One suggestion was that we should move from our “legacy” copper wires to fibre. It turns out that the entry-level tariff for fibre would not be that much more expensive than our current one, especially if we moved our landline from BT to Zen. In the meantime, while we were thinking about it, the Zen engineer would “reconfigure our line” and see if that helped.

Following the phone call, our Internet connection went down. We were expecting this to happen during the reconfiguration process but believed it would come back on afterwards. At intervals during the evening, we tried the connection but it was dead. It was still dead on Tuesday morning.

I phoned Zen and was put through to a very helpful engineer called Daniel. We were on the phone together for the next hour and a half! We went through the whole of the connection, including the settings in the router. Unfortunately, this was all in vain. The router was connecting with Zen but refused to log in. It seems likely that either the router has failed or that, being an older model, it is unable to cope with modern faster DSL. Perhaps, too, the line reconfiguration has brought matters to a head.

What was the solution to this dilemma? A new router? Move to fibre? According to Daniel, as we had been customers of Zen for a number of years and had had no hardware from them apart from our very first router, we qualified for a new router – free of charge! If that solved our problems, so well and good, otherwise, there remained the option of moving to fibre.

In the meantime. we are not entirely without an Internet connection. Our iPhones can of course go online, and each of them has a “hotspot”, that is, a wireless Internet connection to which other devices can connect . This is what we have been using to watch videos in the evnings. Since Monday evening, I have been using mine to run the Internet on my computer.

Using our phones this way provoked the following thought: “Why not always use our phones for our Internet connection?” If we did that, we could dispense with an ISP altogether. We could also kiss BT goodbye as we would no longer require a landline. Though a nice idea, it would not work, unfortunately. While it is possible to use the hotspot to watch videos or view websites on the PC, if you try to do heavier work involving multiple sites and uploading and downloading big files, the whole thing slows down to a virtual stop and becomes useless. Presumably this is because the hotspot provides insufficient bandwidth to deal with this sort of work.

It seems, then, that we will be continuing with Zen for the foreseeable future, though the phone hotspots remain available in an emergency or when we are away from home.

I have been informed by text and by email that the new router will arrive later this morning. They said that it is very easy to set up. I will let you know how that goes in due course!