(For the context of this post, see the three previous posts.)
Yesterday evening, I received a further phone call from Zen, this time to arrange a time when an engineer could visit. We agreed a morning visit for the next day (today) in the morning. As is usual in such cases, they could say only that he would arrive between 8 am and 1 pm.
This morning, then, I rose bright and early to be ready by 8 am. Needless to say, the doorbell did not ring at 8 am or, indeed, for some time after that.
At 9:23 I received a text from Openreach: “Our engineer Joe [mobile number] has your job and will call you before working on your task [URL]”. The URL leads to a website with a diagram showing progress of the “task”:
As you can see, at that point it was standing only at “Engineer Allocated”.
At 10:29, the engineer rang to say he would arrive in about 20 minutes. He was right on time!
There then followed an hour during which the engineer performed tests and then made numerous phone calks to various agencies including Zen. This ended with him departing to the exchange to do some work there. He would then phone me to know whether I could now connect to the Internet. If so, the job would be complete; if not, he would have to come back here again.
Whatever the engineer did at the exchange did not produce the hoped-for result. At just after 1 pm he was back with me, saying that it was now thought there a problem with the router itself. After some more tests and attempts to obtain a result, done in consultation over the phone with Zen, work stopped as no further progress could be made today.
That of course leaves us without an Internet connection (apart from our iPhone hotspots) for another day. I received a call during the work from the Zen person, R, who called on Monday and he said he will call me again later today. Perhaps I can then discuss with him a way forward out of this apparent impasse.
SilverTiger at home and abroad 
I can empathise with your connectivity issues. There are just so many different variables, any one or more of which can stymie your system’s ability to get onto the Internet. We went through some difficult times over the last five years, with two different ISPs (both of which used DSL because there’s no fibre into our area, let alone our building, and no plans to install any for the foreseeable future).
There are free software tools that can run analyses on your hardware and connection, but most of them seem geared to the Android market rather than Apple (largely because Apple make it so difficult for software writers to qualify to be listed as an approved provider).
The jargon alone can act as a barrier to understanding, let alone the mental models you have to create in order to imagine the various possible points of failure (which can sometimes act in unison so that even if you work out how to fix one, that may not get you where you want to be because there’s another that needs to be fixed and it may not even be apparent).
I hard-wired (i.e. ethernet) most of our systems into our ISP-provided router because I discovered the wi-fi spectrum locally was seriously overcrowded, contributing to the problems in unseen ways. It doesn’t help that we have many devices, one way or another, that are all clamouring to be heard by the router (which is a dual band – so 2.4 and 5 GHz).
If I can offer any suggestions, I’m happy to help, but chances are you’re better off leaving it to the so-called “stakeholders” to fix the problem they created 🙂 I hope they don’t throw their collective hands up in despair and admit total failure, or blame someone else who are beyond your ability to demand action (as happens sometimes here in the US (I’m looking at you, AT&T, Comcast/Xfinity, and HOAs in general).
I don’t recommend Elon Musk’s satellite-based solution – too expensive and too slow. You’re better off with your mobile hotspots.
Peter in FtL (retired IT bod)
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I phoned Zen this morning in the hope of pushing things along and was told to expect a call from their Faults Manager later. Let’s hope that this will lead to positive action.
In the meantime, I have received the usual monthly rental invoice. – ironic in the circumstances.
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