Unplugged

Yesterday afternoon I lost broadband here, thanks to a cock-up on the part of Virgin Media. We’d haggled and gotten a better deal for the next 18 months, with a slightly lower broadband speed, and the final step was getting the account put back in my mother’s name. Evidently, thanks to reduced staff levels and many folks working from home, something got missed and we were without any broadband internet access.

This has thrown into sharp focus just how much stuff we do online that relies on broadband, and how much of that we could do just on our phones with 4G connections.

While I can do my email, check my RSS feeds and handle a few other things on my 1st-generation iPhone SE, that’s about as much as it could realistically handle. Not only is the screen cramped, but so is its storage capacity, and I’m currently on a low data allowance, albeit one that rolls over unused data from the previous month.

I think that I will need to look into either a bigger phone at some point, or a cellular-capable iPad, as a future fallback in the event of loss of broadband. That way, I could have a mobile hotspot to tide me over for a few days.

(A side-note: Virgin Media have some of the worst, most repetitive hold music I’ve ever had inflicted on my ears, and it didn’t help that the sound quality was awful. Not exactly a good advertisement for your services, guys.)