09 November 2006

The strange case of the mystery broadband outage

Newly appointed science correspondent Hal Berstram investigates the cause of a three-hour ADSL line failure in an ordinary Essex village...

Better call the Torchwood people, someone's playing silly buggers with the lines round here.

There was no giroscope post last night as the broadband failed to work for about 3 hours, which happened to coincide with the time I had free to use the computer in between watching various rubbish on TV and eating dinner. The modem diagnostics just showed an "ADSL synchronization failure". On the modem itself, the ADSL light just kept blinking on and off six times in a row, then going off for a couple of seconds, then doing six blinks again. The modem is quite a cheap ethernet one, and doesn't even have wireless capability, but it's been very reliable for the last 3 and a half years. I've attached a shot below as I think the green lights look quite cool at low resolution:



By 11pm the whole thing was back up and running again but by then I was too knackered to blog, for sure.

Has anybody else suffered this kind of weird temporary outage? My supplier is BT, who are expensive but have been completely reliable up to now.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You can't call Torchwood. You're not in Cardiff.

Anonymous said...

Yeah but surely they could come down the M4 and sort it out?