The joys...
It was exceptionally slow all evening, so I was suspicious, but thought it was just my wireless playing up. Naturally though, it went down, the router started getting a 192.168.100.10 IP and the modem logs told a tale of woe. It came back up half an hour later, though...then went down again, in a slightly more worrying fashion (the modem appeared not to operate at all - the router wasn't being assigned any IP whatsoever). Looking at the logs on the thing talks of software upgrade files and it just hanging onto the end of an unresponsive network. Not good.
If there's one thing I can say about cable, it's that when stuff goes wrong for me it does so catastrophically. The last time we had a problem was a couple of years back when some idiot with a JCB went through a rather expensive fibre somewhere in East Leeds (or so I'm told) - not exactly their fault, though it did take out TV, internet, phone...AKA everything. But as I said, not their fault.
Even this problem last night didn't really bother me, if I'm honest - as I said, it's a rare occurrence round here. What really grated with me was the fact that both the 'Service Status' and 'Faults' telephone lines returned 'Your call could not be connected' and 'Customer Services' was engaged. Yes, ENGAGED. How on earth can customer services for a multi-billion pound corporation be ENGAGED?!
Let me guess, the same people who screwed up last night are responsible for the incoming call routing as well.