Internet connection

[pne]

A couple of weeks ago, someone from Hansenet called us to offer a new option: a set-top box which would enable us to watch television and rent videos over the Internet -- something they were (he said) only offering a small set of customers at the moment. So I suppose I'm a bit of a beta tester.

He also said that they'd knock 5 euros off the price of our Internet connection (which is the price that you'd pay if you signed up now, but not a price that existing subscribers could ordinarily get), so with the €9.90 for the TV option, it'd effectively only be 5 euros more than what we pay now.

He also said that our Internet connection would be upgraded from 6 to 16 Mbps, and that the lower cost would remain even if we cancelled the TV option (don't remember what he said about the connection speed).

So on Monday, the 16th (yesterday), the date they said they'd switch over our option, the telephone stopped working. Rather annoying. Internet didn't work, either.

In the evening, Internet worked, but WLAN didn't. Telephone was still out.

So I called up Hansenet and they tested the line but couldn't sort anything out. They called back a couple of times but no dice. Finally the problem seemed to have solved itself. (Part of it was that Stella had put the wrong wire into our phone while she had been playing around with the new modem, but I think that wasn't the only problem.)

So then we could telephone and also use the Internet, both from the new modem they had sent us and our existing Fritz!Fon -- but only via cable, in both cases.

We also hooked up the set-top box to the new modem, but while it got further than when Stella had first tried it (it downloaded new software from the Internet, and the LED on the modem for that port was blinking the whole time), it didn't get further than 3/4 on some kind of progress screen. (It's working today, though, Stella said.)

Now we're going to figure out what to do -- especially how we're going to connect to the Internet. I would like to keep the Fritz!Fon, but that only works well if we use WLAN, which doesn't work on her laptop, since the F!F only has one Ethernet port. Another solution would be to connect a switch behind it and run cables from that to the two PCs we're planning on buying from Aldi tomorrow (since they won't have WLAN), but then we couldn't use TV-over-IP.

That was something Stella had been hoping for, since she was hoping for some decent children's programming -- what's on cable currently is not always suitable for someone Amy's age, and the marketing chap had promised a wide variety of channels, including children's channels.

But, she said, she might end up chucking the TV set entirely and using her new computer as a television (it'll have TV-in, IIRC, just like our current -- broken -- computer) and as a DVD player (which would have the advantage that she knows what will be playing, so she could just stick Miffy or Caillou in).

So we shall have to see.