Off-line

I've been off the Internet for a week and only managed to get back online yesterday when Maxis finally did resolve the problem of my home broadband connection. The problem was not theirs to begin with but they took an awfully long time to troubleshoot it.

My problem began with a thunderstorm on 07 July 2020 afternoon. It was raining when suddenly a huge thunderclap sounded without any warning. Boom, and the electricity tripped in the whole house. Learnt later that a flash of lightning had struck an electrical pole outside my neighbour's house. That would be left than 20 feet away from my house. In any event, the lightning tripped not only my house but that of my neighbours. Possibly, about eight houses were affected. The neighbour on my left, the one with the electric pole outside the house, suffered the most damage to his electrical items: router, ceiling fans, electric cooker, The neighbour on my right had a ceiling fan damaged. Others suffered varying degrees of damage. Mine was confined to my Internet connection. My desktop's USB ports may have fried too but I haven't been able to confirm it yet.

Anyway, that same afternoon of the seventh, I made my complaint to the Maxis service and had arranged for their technician to come in on the 10th. He came in the morning, made some tests to the equipment - the cables, modem and router - and said the modem was damaged. Herein the snag. Although the router was supplied by Maxis, the modem was TMNet's. Maxis Broadband rides on TMNet's unifi infrastructure and has to use TMNet's modem. Therefore, to change the modem, the TMNet technician was needed to come in together.

I had to leave it to the Maxis technician to make the arrangements. We'll call you, he said. So I waited and waited. On Sunday - they work on Sunday?? - the Maxis service centre called and said they'd be turning up with TMNet on the 14th morning.

And on the 14th morning, the Maxis technician turned up but alone. A different guy. He diagnosed the problem as the router, not the modem. Maybe that's what he informed back to the service centre because the TMNet personnel did not even show up. Anyway, the Maxis technician changed my equipment to a new modem and quickly set up my WiFi network. It worked like a charm with my wife's laptop, iPad mini and my mobile. I plugged in my Lan cable and presto! my desktop connection came back alive. So everything is back to normal. Mighty glad that almost everything's turned out alright. Now to look into my USB ports...

P.S. My DEC phone is dead but that is another problem.....