My phone is finally fixed.

Those of you who read my post I is for ice-cream and internet connection will be aware of our recent troubles with the phone and subsequent loss of decent internet connectivity. Instead of getting better, it just got worse and the telephone became unusable. I phoned my telecoms provider using my mobile phone and again they warned me it would be costly if they sent out an engineer and the fault was with my equipment. They agreed to send one the following morning. I wanted it fixed, whatever the cost.


My mobile phone is a "pay-as-you-go" with T-mobile. I don't use it much. In fact I'd topped it up with £10 in April 2004 and by December 2007 I still had just over £2 credit left. You have to make a call every 180 days to keep the phone active though and I missed it by a day. I was told I could reactivate it; it would cost me £10 and I'd regain my £2 credit. Alternatively, if I wasn't bothered about keeping the number, I could go online and buy a new sim-card for just 50p. This I did and on my tarriff, calls are 15p per minute compared to the 30p on my previous tarriff. What I didn't know (and the information was nowhere to found on T-mobile's website) that calls to 0845 numbers are 40p per minute, so my call to report my faulty phone cost over £2. I've subsequently discovered that even calls to 0800 numbers (free from any landline) are also charged at 40p per minute.


On Wednesday morning, a BT-engineer dutifully arrived. The fault lay with the cable outside the house. It seems that when a tree by the telegraph pole was chopped down last year, it had frayed the cable and allowed water to seep into the connection. As the cable crossed the road he had to call in assistance to replace it.


Afterwards I plugged my cordless telephone/answering machine back in as there was obviously nothing wrong with it. It still took until Sunday morning though for my internet speed to get back up to near-normal.