After reading our Back from the weekend post, you may be wondering why I didn’t post all this info on Sunday. I actually would have loved to do that except our Internet was dead. We’ve been having problems off and on lately and were getting dropped during the afternoons sometimes. Since we had problems at our old house from time to time, we didn’t think much of it.

After unplugging and resetting the router didn’t work Stefan broke down and called tech support. This should signify just how badly he was wanting his Internet. We barely were on the Internet this weekend while at his parents and we were hoping to relax a bit on the couch to prepare for the week ahead, catch up the blogs and do some web surfing. Not possible when the Internet doesn’t connect at all.

Unfortunately he wasn’t thrilled with the support line of 1&1 which provides our Internet. You have to go through 6 voice automated prompts (which never really understand you correctly so it turns out being about 10 interactions) just to reach a live person..and all for the bargain price of 45 cents a minute. Awesome.

The first service guy told us the problem lied with our firmware for our router. Apparently it doesn’t update on its own and they also don’t inform you at any time that there is new firmware available. Of course the update was available on their website which we couldn’t access. Great. So we called back (another 6 prompts by the computer) and ask if they can email the file to Stefan’s BlackBerry. They informed us they could…and then we realized we don’t have the software installed on our laptop anymore for the BlackBerry to interface with the computer…and the disk has also gone missing. Lovely.

So we moved on to Plan B and went to the next larger town over to find a hotspot or Internet cafe. After a few failed attempts to get online at various spots, we finally found a network we could use. Downloading the file only took about a minute and then we headed back home…an hour after our search began. We got the firmware updated and the Internet STILL didn’t work. So Stefan made another call to 1&1. This time the problem laid with our phone line. Apparently the connection was trying to reset itself and thought that we had a second line in the house or something…no clue really but this was something only Deutsche Telekom could fix. They told us if we didn’t hear anything from them by Tuesday (not if it’s not fixed by then but that we just hadn’t heard anything) we should give them another call.

If our contract wasn’t until November, Stefan would have canceled the service from 1&1 and gone back to Deutsche Telekom immediately. Although we would have to pay more with the latter at least they control the phone lines and can take action when there is a problem. 1&1 is essentially outsourcing the line so they have to go through Deutsche Telekom…and unfortunately a lot of their workers are now on strike.

So all we could do was hope for the best and find other ways to occupy our time. Of course since we spent about 3 hours trying to get the Internet to work there wasn’t much left of the afternoon anyway.

Very thankfully the Internet started working again yesterday at about 2pm. I almost went into Internet overload, finally being able to access all my emails and get some work done. Since we don’t have TV hooked up at the moment, the Internet really is our main entertainment on some evenings. So when it’s broken we really suffer. But at least we now know that should our Internet start dropping, we need to check for a firmware update. Then we can hopefully avoid all of this hassle again!