Vocal Voices

Spoke to Mrs S about 3pm local today. She was supposed to go find her mobile and send me a photo of her driving license front page so I could order her another one and bring it back with me.

Went back to work, but pinged her at about 8pm local. Only one tick on Whatsapp, home phone (on internet), was going straight to mailbox. By 11pm local I was concerned, checked and the home internet is down (I can check that from anywhere), tried Whatsapp again, one tick, tried calling, mailbox, tried a text message, nothing.

I started looking around for options when I realised that one of our friends holds a key and I have her on Whatsapp. Sent a message, with profuse apologies as it was midnight. One tick.

So our town is down again, not just for internet but for mobile phone's too. Worse this time as last time text messages were up but data was down.

I'm going to have to get satellite backup and the French have just blocked Starlink which is the only viable service for conference calling.

We have rubbish reception here and we're on satellite.

Suff,
I assume you are in England, being able to post on here. It can be frustrating when you lose internet connections.
This is one reason I still have a landline phone. Very rarely use it. I do ask for incoming calls to be sent to it as I have a loud ringer
on one of the extensions in the hall.
Have got used to using the mobile phone for most phone calls.

Hope everything is sorted soon suff

It came back this morning Saundra.

Yes I'm in England right now. Was in the middle of a whatsapp backwards and forwards when we lost communications. The concerning thing was that I was unable to get in touch with Mrs S by any means. Both internet, landline (through the internet) and mobile were down. Not even text messages were working.

It's a bit disconcerting that the town can go down like that. It's not like we're on Satellite, we're on main Fibre only installed in Feb. Really this should not happen, especially the cell phone towers going out.

It took a while but all my stuff has reset now and I can access everything again.

JanB wrote:We have rubbish reception here and we're on satellite.

The only satellite intenernet which is not rubbish is SpaceX Starlink, which is available in Portugal now. It's the same satellite that Ukraine is using to keep their country connected.

The main problem is that it costs a lot more than most other solutions. Starlink is €500 for the terminal and €99 a month for the service. As it is still in build out it occasionally has issues but never for long. SpaceX are pushing more satellites up there at a rapid rate. Over 100 will go this month and each following month is slated for over 100.

If you don't have a real need, then it is too expensive. I would have ordered it to back up the local network now I've had two outages, but the French courts have removed the SpaceX certification for deployment in France for "Competition" reasons. As far as I can work out it is because they are too Much competition, not because they are not competitive.

Couldn't make it up Suff, could you

Glad it's ok now stuff
Every last thing is dependent on the internet
How did we manage before
I do however have a landline phone in a draw to use in emergency
I don't have a mobile tho

We took the decision to replace the fixed landline phone with an IP phone connected to the Internet. The price was 60% less for close to equivalent free calls we had before. Orange to plans with mobile and fixed internet so that if you lose the landline you can use the mobile. They even give you extra mobile data when the landline goes down.

I don't think they thought it fully through when they connected the mobile masts to the same backbone internet as the home internet....

No use giving me 200gb of data (they did in the last cut off), when the mobile can't connect anywhere.