I woke up on Saturday 7th of may 2011 at 6am to find a flashing red light on my adsl router. This would indicate that there is no internet coming into the router or rather the router cannot access the interweb.
Jazztel has been rather good in the last couple of years since moving from telefonica, pretty reliable and I have only seen a couple of minor outages for 15 minutes each time, so thought maybe this was another occasion where the connection has dropped.
(Any normal sane person would have either switched on the telly or gone back to bed, but I work from home and rely heavily on my internet connection for my businesses so even 5 seconds of downtime on adsl is a nightmare for me!)
POST UPDATED Monday 9th of May 2011 – 9.00am – still no adsl in marbella on our adsl line but the red light on the router has gone but the green light is not on yet, meaning that “something is happening “somewhere”.
POST UPDATED Tuesday 10th of May 2011 – 9.00am – still no adsl, outgoing calls work, but incoming calls fail when people call our number.
POST UPDATED Wednesday 11th of May 2011 – 16.40 – same as yesterday, no adsl no phone line. in centre of Marbella. I am just off the old town so I am real central.
POST UPDATED Thursday 12th of May 2011 – 09:17 – same as yesterday, phone line works but STILL no adsl. This is Nuts. I have a business account with Jazztel. This totally and utterly sucks now. Telefonica SUCKS!!!
Usually restarting the router gets it going again. So I restarted the router and still a red light. I unplugged all the cables, turned of the router again, plugged everything back in, switched the router on again, still a red light.
Dang. Maybe its a problem with the line then? So I tried calling the number that my adsl is hosted on. Totally dead, no ringtone, dial tone, nothing.
Now I am starting to think that maybe I missed a bill or something and they cut me off, so I powered up my ipad which has a 3g card in it, and logged into my jazztel account. Everything fine on that front, all bills paid and up to date.
I then tried calling the jazztel helpline and its all automated these days, so I was asked to enter my nine digit phone number where my adsl is hosted, I entered the number and immediately was told in Spanish that “this is to inform you that there is an incident in your area related to your line and we are working to fix it quickly. Thank you for calling jazztel”.
Ah ok, no problems then, they will have that sorted soon, probably someone knocked a cup of coffee onto a hub in the exchange and they are replacing it. Sur it will be back soon.
Well, its now Sunday 8th of May 10.45am and still no sign of internet. So in the meantime I am connecting through a spare movistar line using a 3g connection via my older iphone.
My good friend Joey has mentioned that there was a fire in Telefonica Centre in Malaga which has knocked out over 50,000 phone lines due to a fire which started in the middle of the night and was put out by 4am.
en.wikinoticia.com is reporting (this HAS to be google translated from somewhere else!)
In a first estimate, 50,000 people are without no phone, no DSL and 4,000 in Manchester because of a fire that broke out around midnight and that has destroyed much of the central Sun of Movistar in Malaga. Employees of several operators reported Forum of the situation inside.
Last night, at 23.40, started a fire in the central Sun of Malaga, which serves the capital in addition to several nearby towns.
Although Telefónica is central, as we read in the thread that opened this afternoon in our forum, has also affected customers and alternative operators, as they have reported several problems Jazztel customers in the area, so that These teams would also have been damaged. In addition, problems are being reported also in mobile telephony.
According to the Diario Sur , the most affected area is the area of the Carretera de Cádiz, and even the emergency services have been affected, since calls to the police or medical emergencies are moving through 112 of Andalusia.
The serious fire which has damaged the fiber optic circuitry Telefonica ADSL and alternative, besides the voice switched Telefónica, was extinguished after four hours of initiation, and a group of 150 people remain in the area to try to repair the damage as soon as possible.
Without knowing the causes of fire, it is expected that the service is restored before the end of today, although from the same forum said that among the operators should be resolved on Tuesday, and then solve customer problems end.
typicallyspanish.com is reporting
A fire in a Telefónica sub-exchange in Málaga city on Friday night resulted in at least 50,000 people losing their phone service along the Costa del Sol as far away as Marbella, Mijas, Fuengirola and Benalmádena.
However, Telefónica say given the size of the blaze it could be that far more people are affected. Several mobile phone masts were also affected, as were some emergency numbers including 112, 061 and the Police for a time.
Málaga firecrews said the fire started in Calle Eduardo Marquina, for reasons still being investigated just before Midnight on Friday night. They had extinguished the blaze by 4am.
A 150 strong emergency team from Telefónica have been working on site since then to restore services. They forecast 50% of the lines will be back at 11pm on Saturday night and the rest should be fixed during Sunday.
4,000 ADSL users in Málaga city centre have also lost their access.
Read more: http://www.typicallyspanish.com/news/publish/article_30394.shtml#ixzz1LkZyVsCC
So I guess my lines will come back up today, tomorrow or the near future. I do have a basic 3g connection to keep me going but I am a technophile geek, so even if I needed to I could install a dial up modem to keep me on the internet, however the whole situation does not distract from the fact that I have spent hours trying to figure the original issue out and also the coming days where I will not have normal access which is going to have an impact on my business in terms of time and money.
In the meantime, telefonica is reporting hundreds of million of euros in profits and laughing all the way to the bank.
