It all seems to have gone OK. We have three green lights on the box which is now attached to the wall and a green light on the new router. So far I haven’t gone as far as to disconnect the old router, so this is still brought to you by old-fashioned technology and copper wires. IF you are confused, you may need this to catch up.

We now also have a black wire trailing down the front of the house at a slight but irritating angle. There are technical reasons for this. Light, it seems, is not good at going round corners  (one way in which the new system is already inferior to the old one). The old one, where electricity WAS able to travel round corners in copper wires, could be tucked discreetly out of sight and fixed to the black beams of our mock-Tudor semi. The new one, where the cable has to avoid corners, has to run directly across a white portion of the frontage.

To be fair the annoying deviation from perpendicular is not due to technology. That is due to the engineer being unable to run a cable in a straight line.

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In a moment I am going to try to link to the new router. IF you don’t hear from me for several days don’t worry, it will just be the mismatch of 21st Century tech and 1950s brains.

It seems that the change to fibre optics is driven by government rather than the phone companies. They want to get everyone connected, even people in the countryside, and they need a fibre optic system to do this. Clearly they have plans to roll out cyber doctors, work and tax collection by fibre optic, which will save a lot of money. And once we are all vulnerable to hackers in everything we do, we will look back on the days of the Great Postal Stoppage with nostalgia.

Oh yes, a brave new world awaits

Talking of which, Royal mail is now delivering overseas mail. However, the catch is that they are just delivering parcels they already have in hand. You still can’t post new parcels, and our backlog is building . . .

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