Storms and flooding rains (and the internet)

 We had a storm early this morning.

No real damage, except that just after the sun  came up, the power went off.

Well, we're an all electric house, so we went to our emergency plan - electric storm lanterns in place - it was really dark, at one point our solar system was generating a massive 58w, normally it manages a kilowatt or so when we have normal cloud cover.

Fortunately while it was windy and very heavy cloud, it wasn't raining seriously meaning I could get out our old gas camping stove on the back deck and heat water for tea, and later on make some breakfast coffee to have with our muesli and yoghurt.

We sat on the back deck and listened to the 8AM news on the crackly AM Radio National signal on our emergency radio  - there had been heavy rain to the west of us and we were next in line for a drenching.

Of course we had the perennial problem that when the power and the internet is out we lose a phone connection - by some quirk of geography our house is located in a mobile blackspot, and we have nearly non existent 4G or 5G coverage.

Before they turned off the 3G service we could get a grudging half a bar of 3G, but now we might as well be on the moon.

Day to day it doesn't matter, wifi calling means we can use our phones normally, but when the power is out. no.

Texts usually get through eventually, which means that we do get the automated message from the power company telling us our smart meter has gone offline and they are investigating, but there's no way we can check on the progress of our trouble ticket via their website. 

We just have to be patient and trust that they are working on it.

So, it was a quiet morning reading - too dark to read a paper book, but backlit screens on tablets and kindles are fine, and some tomato soup and bread for lunch.

As we were tidying up after lunch the power came back.

As always, we waited for fifteen minutes to make sure it was really back on, and then started resetting appliance clocks etc, and while doing this I noticed the wi-fi enabled cat feeder's status light was blinking. 

Sure enough the internet had not come back - well it had, sort of, but the modem was trying to use its backup 5G connection in place of our fibre optic connection.

Now, given our poor 5G coverage, as you might have guessed, the 5G backup connection is as much use as a chocolate teapot.

I thought we might have had a race condition whereby the modem had booted up faster than the fibre optic box  and finding no working fibre connection had defaulted to the useless 5G backup connection.

So, I restarted the modem by pulling the power cord out, singing 'happy birthday to you' - takes about 30s - and plugged it back in.

That seemed to work, except the internet TV and radio connections kept dropping out, and sure enough, every so often the modem would flip over to the 5G connection and then flip back to the fibre optic connection.

And then I remembered to slightly odd conversation I'd had with a Telstra engineer when I was in FNQ and he wanted me to restart the fibre optic box to fix a connectivity issue after a power outage while we were away.

Now at the time we were nearly 3000km from home, and consequently unable to do anything, and anyway the internet was working perfectly when we got home, so I'd kind of forgotten what he told me to do.

But I remembered the gist of the conversation so I popped the case off the fibre optic box and pulled the power cable out, even though the diagnostic lights all looked normal, we had optical, we had ethernet on the correct port, and no panic light.

I did the happy birthday thing again, watched it boot up and the lights that should be green were green and those that should be orange, orange, and that all the others were off.

Then I power cycled the modem again, again doing the happy birthday thing, and this time when it booted up it found the fibre optic connection and gave a solid signal, and stayed solid.

The internet radio worked. We could watch the internet only TV channels and importantly the cat feeder had connectivity.

So, lesson learned, restart the fibre optic box if, after a power outage, the internet's iffy ...