Winter Be* Gone
Sods Law. Curse whoever gave it a name. My Be* Pro ADSL2+ connection has been running constantly without outage since July when it was installed – modem has never been powered off and the internet has never been down. 3 days after i go away for christmas – my VPN goes down. Since there has never been an issue with the connection i immediately thought my house had been flooded/on fire/broken into. The next day i drove down (7 hour round trip, in the thick heavy 15mph on the motorway kind of snow) to find that all i needed to do was reboot the modem! Shock horror this has never happened before. Few days later, it happened again, i gave up this time, since it was Christmas Eve i just took out home insurence instead (which i had been meaning to do for a while).
I got back a few days later and again, rebooted the modem. Weird. Went onto the Be* forums and it appears as of 20th December, many many people who previously it was fine, have been having issues. Could it be the cold? Maybe. Personally, i think that there has been some firmware updates on the DSLAMs/Line cards and it’s causing a problem. That said however, i did notice there was noise on my voice line when the internet went off – it’s been on and off like a yoyo for the last few days. Not had to actually reboot the modem yet though, it’s been coming back up on it’s own.
I think i’ll wait it out for a little while, given so many people are having problems which has not attributed to the usual bad filters/cables etc i’ll see how it goes. On the plus side, Be*’s customer service is faultless – on Christmas Eve i was in an IRC chat with someone who helpfully – although i’m not running their modem and couldn’t swap any plugs about, checked the connection status to see if the modem was online, re-training etc.
They have also announced that line bonding will be available starting end of January – BONDING!!! At a price of around £55/monthly, total. 44meg down 5meg up (max). Yes please!