Some days ago I was having a spot of bother with my broadband connections and so I phone up BT about it, landing on a very pleasant and helpful young lady. Oh sir, she said. We've not been shipping Voyager 210 routers for years and years. Your's must be on its last legs. Let's fix it for now and then I can organise sending you a nice new one. So she fixes it for now - or rather she reminds me how to reboot the thing by poking a needle down the reboot hole - and then she reads off pages and pages of options and prices. Complete price transparency by information overload and I wind up buying some basic package around something called infinity, something which can cope with the facts that this PC cannot do wifi and that I do want to do wifi at home with my telephone.
First evidence of action is an email explaining what I have just bought, plus some timetable and plus some instructions. It seems that the drill is that my existing broadband will pack up at some point on the due day and that they will send me a text when the new broadband is ready and I can plug in the new stuff. Maybe half an hour's loss of service. Half an hour of disconnect from the big wide world. Will I bear able to bear the pain?
Second evidence is a text message. Which is good because it proves that BT has got the right number.
I think there is more evidence at this point. After which a slim brown parcel is poked through the letter box, its contents having been cunningly designed and arranged so that this can happen.
And then, a day or so later, on the due day, the broadband does indeed pack up mid morning. In fact it goes on the blink in a literal way with the second light from the left on the router taking to a steady green blinking and the the third light from the left taking to a steady off, with this off meaning off broadband connection.
And then we wait for the text, which they did say might be quite late. We go to bed without a text having arrived. We get out of bed to no text and decide to plug the new stuff in anyway, a plugging in which turns out to be as easy as the helpful young lady had claimed. After perhaps 10 minutes we have our shiny new infinity broadband service and I am able to read the email telling me that the service is back up. I must have misread the bit in the instructions about how they tell you the service is back up - but, given the amount of thought that must have gone into packaging infinity up for market, one might have thought that they might have worked out that the customer might not be able to receive an email once the old broadband service has been taken down. So new service delivery good, but not perfect.
Next step is to try to connect my telephone to the wifi, and after a certain amount of faffing about with passwords, I manage it. I even manage to read an email on the telephone. So that works too, but it is all a bit clunky and I can't see me doing it much. I think I could make it less clunky by getting the telephone to remember various passwords but that strikes me as a bit insecure so I don't want to do that either. Let's hope that it hasn't done it anyway when I wasn't looking.
Last step is to decide what to do with the various cables, splitters and routers that are left over. First thought was to keep the cables and dump the rest. Second thought was that one of these routers is going for near £20 on ebay. Can I be bothered to sell the two that I now have going spare?
With broadband back up and running I thought that I would celebrate by doing a full scan with Malwarebytes (see https://www.malwarebytes.org/), something that a different helpful BT person thought might help Norton keep dodgy software at bay, but something one had to run by hand from time to time if one did not want to buy a proper copy. And there clearly was some dodgy software on the PC as I was getting irritating pop-ups from time to time. One could get rid of them easily enough, but they did keep coming back. So I run a full scan, during which it finds one bit of bad software and removes it. Pop-ups vanish for day 1 of infinity but have popped back for day 2. Clearly time for another chat with the people at BT.
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