Busted

 Ellie was dropped off early this morning. She was in a chirpy mood and having demolished her breakfast and completed her ablutions, we took her off to school. We returned for a quiet breakfast before cracking on with the dealings of the day.

The weather was mixed. Heavy showers were separated by bright warm sunshine. In one dry spell, I headed out for a walk clutching some cards for posting and with my audiobook stuck in my ears. I was stopped on the walk by a neighbour asking whether she could listen to audiobooks on her phone. I explained that was what I was doing and described how it all worked. I returned to my walk and stopped in at the Barbershop for a haircut. Moving on, I dropped into the Chemist to collect Di's prescription, then headed home. I saw an engineer from Openreach just around the corner from home. I asked if there was a problem as I was expecting an Openreach visit this afternoon. He was doing an installation but was the engineer due to visit me this afternoon. He suggested I try to switch in a new Ethernet cable while I was waiting.

I arrived home and tried the suggested swap. Ping, the router burst back into life. The problem was solved.

Oh no, it wasn't.

Within 5 minutes it crashed again. Nothing would coax it back into life. While I struggled to come up with a solution, Diane headed off to the hairdresser.

The Openreach engineer arrived. He tried a number of diagnostic tests which showed the service itself was still up and running. His conclusion was that the router was busted had failed and needed to be replaced. I called EE and they are sending out a new router... meanwhile, we are still relying on tethering our devices to our phones.