When I arrived home from work yesterday evening, a parcel had arrived from Orange - a new Netgear broadband router. As part of our continuing efforts to save money, we are switching from British Telecom to Orange.
Great, I thought. I’ll wait for the paperwork to come through informing us when the switchover will happen, and think about how we’re going to do this.
Had dinner, caught up with what everybody else had been doing during the day, and then wandered into the study to check on email.
Or not.
No internet connection.
Ah. Perhaps this was connected to the cryptic SMS I received from Orange at lunchtime - “all set, you’re ready to go”.
Verging on being really rather angry, I ripped the BT router out of the wall (actually, that sounds more spectacular than it was - I carefully unplugged it), and plugged the new router in.
Hmmm the lights are on, but the computer can’t see it. I wonder if the standard IP addresses show anything 192.168.0.1? Nope. Let’s try resetting the router in the study. Oh look - I can see the router’s web interface.
Following a quick call to Orange Customer Support for a password, the internet connection woke up, assigned us an IP address, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
If you’re wondering why I’m so surprised about any of it working, the last time we changed broadband supplier, we lost our internet connection for 6 months.