You know I’ve been having issues with my Internet connection, here in France. Not long ago, I thought I was free of problems…
I sent my Freebox back and signed up with a cable company. At least I could see the cable socket in its little box on the wall of my apartment, otherwise I might have hung on for a sixth month waiting for Free and France Telecom to get their various acts together. But I was tempted by the appeal of an ISP with their own cables and sockets, and real people in a shop in Rennes whom I could go to and cry when it didn’t work.
Two weeks after signing up we called them (a colleague did the talking, thanks Olivier). They told us I did not exist. Its kinda complicated becaue two cable companies got merged and they told us to go talk to the other one as I was not on their database. The other company said they didn’t even deal with Rennes and we should talk to the first one again. (These phone calls cost 33cents per minute!)
The first cable company finally found my records (!) and told us my connection would commence the following Monday. The weekend came. No cable modem arrived. Monday came (yesterday, in fact); it’s hard to know if I have a connection without the necessary gadget.
Franck and I went to the real office of my ISP to talk to those real people. The real girl at the desk was really helpful: She told us straight off:-
- my building is not cabled 0)
(but have a socket in the wall) - their web site should have checked the address and prevented me from registering with them 3)
(but I have a printout of the confirmation email from them) - if I want to be connected to the Internet, I should try and get DSL 😕
(but I already tried that for five months )
Aargh!