A number of years ago I remember my friend Damon writing a series of posts in the JEB forum, in which he suggested that BT stands not for British Telecom but for Bloody Terrible. This is a sentiment with which I can now sympathise.

For the past twelve months or so, we have been fortunate enough to have wireless internet in our house. It was a highly exciting development when my mother agreed to have it installed, and it has been even more exciting since Babel bought me my own computer and I can actually use it I got my computer at Christmas, and for the first six weeks or so, everything seemed to be going swimmingly well. But when we hit February, problems started to develop. Quite often I’d be using my computer bt night when suddenly the internet connection would cut out. Initially I assumed this was just some sort of random network problem and the signal was temporarily too weak for me to connect to, but it seemed different to any kind of connectivity issue which I had experienced elsewhere before. My computer was still able to detect the network, was proclaiming it to have an excellent signal in fact, but whenever I tried to connect to it it would say it was unable to, and Windows was unable to diagnose and repair the problem. What’s more, I soon discovered that leaving my computer switched off for twenty four hours and hoping it would cure itself was not successful. The only way to get the internet connection back was seemingly to turn the wireless hub off at the power and switch it back on again. This admittedly worked every time, but doesn’t seem an ideal solution to the problem. (more…)