It was a perfectly normal Monday morning.
As we often do in winter we sat in bed with the cats while the heat pump warmed the house and read the online news sites before getting up.
Then while making breakfast I turned on the internet radio to get the nine o'clock news on Radio National. I left the radio on after the news for background noise while we ate breakfast and drank our coffee.
We were talking about something on the online news when we noticed that everything had gone quiet.
Well occasionally the internet radio gets confused and needs a restart, so I restarted it. At the same time I noticed that the IPTV decoder was showing a blue and a red light which usually means the internet has glitched.
The internet modem was showing a solid red light and the fibre optic router, while it has some activity, did not look as busy as it should.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained, I power cycled the fibre optic box, and waited for about ten minutes to let it settle.
The internet modem was still a solid red light, so I power cycled that as well.
Well that had absolutely zero impact, so I did it again, to absolutely no effect.
It was beginning to look like a cable fault, which is a pain, and more than it should be.
In theory, our modem should fail over to the 5G phone network, but where we live, we do not have a usable 5G or 4G signal. Sometimes in the old days, we would get a little bit of 3G, but they turned the 3G service off in October, leaving us dependent on the fixed internet.
So, just like when our modem fried itself last Decmber, I went up to the Library to use their internet to tell Telstra we had a problem.
As I was walking across Town Hall Gardens I got a text message from Telstra to say that there was a major outage, and we would be off for the rest of the day and possibly part of tomorrow, but not to worry our modem had switched over to 5G, which of course it hadn't.
Well there was no point contacting them, but I went into the library to check my email - I'd taken my little Chromebook with me, really to contact Telstra via their app - but it turned out to be waste of time Telstra was the library's internet provider as well (something I should have known from when the Athenaeum lost the internet, that all our council services use Telstra).
J had been to the pharmacy to drop off some scripts, and they were unable to process them as they had no internet access to Medicare or anything else, and when we walked down to the post office to collect our mail, they were closed, I guess for a start all the smart parcel lockers needed the internet to operate, so we had ourselves a walk round past the lake.
My phone pinged twice, once for a text message from the Forest Fire management people about a planned preventive burn, and once for an email.
The 5G service such as it was seemed even worse than usual, I guess because those people with a working backup connection had flooded the tower with connection requests.
We'd been to the supermarket in Myrtleford the day before, which was probably to the good as I guessed, just like during the CrowdStrike, all these sophisticated internet tills in our local IGA would have stopped working, or at best the IGA would only able to take cash.
Likewise, out experience when the modem fried itself had taught us we could still get old style FM radio, not to mention the free to air TV channels, and anyway, we read books, real paper books, so entertainment wasn't going to be a problem.
Fortunately, I'd made all the phone calls I'd needed to make before the internet went down, and I still keep a paper diary as a backup to my online calendar, so losing the internet was an irritation more than anything.
We usually do an internet grocery order once a week for cat litter, and other bulk items like dishwasher tablets and coffee beans, but we had enough to manage comortably for a few days.
I'd also dealt with our bills yesterday, so the lack of internet banking was not a problem.
So, since it was a nice afternoon, rather than spending some time with Katherine Scragg as I'd planned, I did some work pruning and tidying in the garden and felt all the better for spending some time outdoors.
By the evening, the 5G backup connection was actually working, if a tad slow. We decided to leave it without resetting anything to see what the morning brings. And then we got curious and we power cycled the modem, and guess what - we had a working fibre optic connection!
I guess that if this happens again, we need to have a plan B, such as driving to a nearby town to use their library internet, or at least somewhere where we can use our 4G modem to get a network connection.
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