There’s a lot of bad things written about UK Internet service providers, so I’m really glad to have a positive tale to tell tonight. My ISP (Plusnet) may not be the least expensive but, after my friend Alex’s experience of moving from Nildram to Virgin and seeing the line speed on his connection drop from 6Mbps to less than 512Kbps (on the same line, with the same equipment at his end) and Virgin telling him that was the most the line would support, I’m reluctant to switch ISPs – especially as my ADSL connection is normally rock solid with the router reporting a connection speed around 7Mbps.

Unfortunately, as I’m here burning the midnight oil, putting the finishing touches on a presentation I’m supposed to be delivering via Live Meeting (over said ADSL line) tomorrow morning – my connection has gone down. Arghhh! After restarting almost all the equipment on my home LAN, I noticed that my router’s PPP interface had not picked up an IP address, despite showing operational DSL status. I called Plusnet, expecting a lengthy wait, only to be surprised as my call was answered within seconds of selecting the technical support option from the ACD prompt. The really helpful tech support guy that I spoke to (Jake) was just working though checking my router settings when he noticed that my local telephone exchange has a major service outage – detected at 22:26 this evening (just before I got home) and due to be cleared by 00:26 (by when I had hoped to be in bed…). Not to worry – at least I know it’s a problem at the exchange.

The good news is that Plusnet also has an exchange status checker in the user tools section of their website – and even though my ADSL line is down, I can use my iPhone’s mobile data connection to access the status reports.

It’s currently a minute past midnight and the connection’s not back up yet… but at least I can feel better as I keep track of BT whilst they fix the line.

[Update: 00:14 and the line is back up… just enough time to publish this blog post and catch some zeds before an early start tomorrow.]