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Lightning has been breaking things again...
(Written: 25/07/2019, Updated: 02/11/2019)

There's been a storm a-coming this week and it's finally been and gone done a-storming too.

Storms been a-storming and I've been a-fixing to go out a-fixing.

A customer called us today because last night a bright flash and a loud explosion coincided with the End of the Internet as we know it.

In these modern times a broken internet is much more noticeable than it was in the olden times before the internet. Back then it didn't matter too much if the internet didn't work for a while, because there wasn't one, and, consequently, the inconvenience was fairly minor.

Today we do so many things on-line that you really notice when it stops working because then you can't do those things any more until it's fixed.

And so it was today.

Some locations are more likely to experience lightning strikes than others.

A remote farmhouse exposed on high ground is like the bulls-eye on Zeus's dartboard in the bar on Mount Olympus at the end of a long hot day when Thor and Loki have been constantly bickering about who's best and won't shut up about it.

(Update: Before we get letters about this, Thor and Loki were just visiting, since they are from Norse mythology and Zeus is Greek. Kind of distant family, I guess. Which, in their case, probably makes things worse. Anyway...)

A single phone cable suspended at pole height running for a mile across open fields is like Loki's mocking finger as he calmly observes, "Hey Bro, pity you're no good at darts. At least you're better than Uncle Zeus, though..."

I wonder if the term "Bulls-eye" is offensive to cyclopes?

At any rate, the BT Business Hub was flashing a purple light indefinitely, which tells us that it had lost it's ability to either hear or speak ADSL. Large surges of voltage have the ability to do that.

Now BT would probably replace the Hub for them, but they really didn't want to have to wait for that to happen. In any case when you live in certain places, having a spare router around can be a good idea in case this sort of thing happens again.

Also, a number of customers employ me just to phone their internet service provider on their behalf. Such is the dread that many people have of engaging with phone support these days... Hmm.

Anyway, I replaced the BT Business Hub router with a TP-LINK TD-W9970 from stock.
See: https://www.broadbandbuyer.com/products/23298-tp-link-td-w9970/

But then there's a trick...

Instead of spending hours finding all the

* PCs,
* MacBooks,
* laptops,
* iPads,
* phones,
* TVs,
* printers,
* cameras,
* door bells,
* loudspeakers,
* fridges,

... and other improbable things that all REALLY need to talk wifi these days, and then manually changing each of their wifi settings to match the new router...

...you just change the new router settings to be the same as the old router settings and everything else carries on working as though nothing happened.

Then you turn everything off and back on, wait for 5 minutes and check to see if it's all talking happily again.

And so it was.

In this case I noticed that one copy of Windows 10 had decided that it was no longer going to Connect Automatically to the wifi. It just required the ticking of a box and all was well with the world again. Sometimes this requires some further adjustments, but not today.

As always, please ContactUs or leave a comment if you'd like more details about anything you've read here. We love to hear from you.

All the best, from Julian Neeves.

Lightning has been breaking things again...

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