Connectivity restored

As she was leaving for school this morning, Clare saw a big builder's lorry at work removing a dump of rubble from the street a few doors down. It's been there for over a month, doubling in size, taking up nearly three parking bays this past week. A major remodelling of the back of a house has been going on during this time, with the sound of hammering penetrating two sets of walls to reach us, six days a week. No builder's skip was used, and the height of rubble reached over five feet in places, posing a safety risk as well as parking 'claim jumping'.

Was it being done with official permission I wondered and enquired of our local councillors, who weren't exactly forthcoming about it. It was a relief to see the back of this - all those loose bricks and pieces of rubble, so easily accessible, would be so easy for a mischief maker to make trouble with, or some kid to treat as a little adventure playground when no adults are watching. Not all who building workers are quite as considerate or safety aware as they should be for the common good.

Finally, at ten thirty this morning, third time lucky, a visit from an OpenReach telephone engineer to sort out our connectivity problem, 22 year old Liam from Ammanford, four years on the job since leaving school, and only recently moved up to work in Cardiff. 

He needed no elaborate diagnostic devices to start with, he'd spotted the problem by the time he got to the front door. The line running from the pole in the street into the house dates back to 1961, and has deteriorated with the passage of time. It wasn't changed, when the switch was made from old style wooden poles which had to be climbed, to hollow easy to manage metal poles. Overhead lines running to individual houses are now accessed through a small ground level hatch in the pole which connects each to an underground cable linked to the area digital relay cabinet. I haven't seen anyone work on this kind of equipment before so I watched with interest from porch, in the rain. Once a new line had been run into the house, a series of electronic line tests were run, and our broadband is now running at 16mbs down, 9mbs up.

I queried why the speed dropped to less than a tenth of what it should be. Liam explained that if an auto-diagnostic process reveals that if the signal to noise quality of a line drops, or connectivity is intermittent for some other reason, a cut out mechanism operates to forestall a potentially damaging power surge. Our line quality has been poor for quite a while, but gone un-noticed until I ran a few online speed tests. What I thought was the just due to our computers slowing down under Windows 10's excessive and un-necessary recourse to internet resources, and unable to handle two devices updating or uploading at the same time was mainly a line problem. Windows doesn't now run much faster, perhaps a little smoother. From boot to working document page is still 2-3 minutes. Anyway, it's such a relief to have this problem sorted at last.

I cooked lunch for Clare, returning home after teaching a morning session, and before returning to school for a staff meeting, then I went for a four mile walk as the light was fading fast. I collided with a small traffic bollard obscured by deep shadow, placed right on the footpath I was taking at the edge of Llandaff Fields to prevent cars being parked on the path and grazed my shin. ThankfulIy, I didn't fall, but I was reminded of the collision with a buttress I had in the dark on the footpath at Territet a year ago. I guess I'm still in denial about being less able to see as well in low light as I used to, and still don't carry a torch. But I am starting to use a smartphone flashlight if I'm less than confident of ever familiar routes, once it's dark. Feeling my age, damn it!