Our internet connection at home travels along the same piece of wet string as does our phone line. (I’m assuming it’s wet string, based on the bandwidth it achieves.) Recently it’s been a bit glitchy, dropping out at random moments. Then the other day I spotted a correlation: it drops out when the phone is in use. This hasn’t always been the case: I’ve been on the phone to support while using my machine, so this is something new.
We spent a while trying to narrow the problem down. Was it answering, being connected, or hanging up the phone that triggered the event? No, it was simply calling the number. Was it one of the filters separating the phone and internet signals? We tried swapping in and out these gadgets. Eventually we had pared the system down to a single filter, with no handsets even connected. Same problem. Either all 7 filters are broken (not totally implausible, they are cheapo dinguses, all over 10 years old), or the problem lies elsewhere.
What will probably look weird, if not downright suspicious, to anyone monitoring us (not that anyone would do such a thing, obviously...) is what was visible from outside. To see when the network went down, we watched the
blinkenlights on the router. To load the network during tests, we downloaded a YouTube video, let it play about halfway through to check the network was stable, then called the landline from a mobile, which stopped the network.
The result of this is that we downloaded the same YouTube video, and interrupted its download halfway with a call from a mobile, about 20 times. Moreover, because the network connection dropped out, it would re-establish with a different IP address each time, as provided by our ISP.
Oh, and what was this ultra-suspicious video? Bonnie Tyler’s
Total Eclipse of the Heart, obviously.
