Cut off in my pr...

Countryside Column for 10 October

Hedge cutting cuts all communication

Regular readers of this column know I am ever calm in the face of adversity.  Seldom do I sound off over life’s little irritations. Equanimity is my watchword.  But this really is just too much to bear.

Deep in the country we struggle to achieve a level of communications that townsfolk take for granted.  There is, for instance, effectively no mobile signal where I live.  On any network. So I have a thing called a Femtocell.  This routes my mobile phone through my Broadband and provides a reasonable level of service as long as you are in the same room as the device. And as long as you have working Broadband.

I am about a mile and a half from the telephone exchange.  Old copper phone cables carry my Broadband down the lane on telegraph poles.  When it works it’s vaguely OK. But it often doesn’t work and it takes an inordinate time to fix.

Take last week when a farmer sliced through the phone cable with a hedge cutter – taking out the service to all in the valley.  Suddenly I have no phone, no internet, and virtually no mobile coverage. Eventually I find a spot in the garden where I can call the service provider. Sorry, says the recorded message, there’s a fault at the exchange.  Our engineers should have it restored within 96 hours. But that’s possibly four days incommunicado!

Two days pass.  Still no service. But an engineer’s van appears up the road. The nice man explains the problems of having to rejoin a hundred tiny severed cables.  But, ominously, says there’s no jobsheet for my address so the service wont be restored even when the cable’s reconnected. I have to report the fault. But I can’t report the fault as I have no phone and no mobile service.  I can use a public phonebox.  A What?! Oh, yes, one of those red things we used to have in the village.

Eventually I find a spot in the garden where the mobile works for long enough to complete the 20 minute wait (at 14p a minute) to get through to report the fault.  The nice lady with the Indian accent tells me it could take another 96 hours for the phone-line to be fixed!!!  And in the meantime I might experience some reduction in my broadband speed.  “Reduction,” I scream down the iPhone: “What *±@£$%^&* broadband?!!”