Yesterday was the day that my new house was supposed to be blessed with internet. NextGenTel sent me a text about a week ago telling me that this was going to happen “between 8am and 4pm”, and that they would call me if they needed access to the house for that. Wanting to make sure that it was not my fault that internet is not delivered as early as possible, I opted to stay home, because if they did call me, it would be pretty inconvenient to have to get home from Oslo for the purpose of opening the door to my house. The real pains of a 2 hour commute are not about getting up early.

So when 16:00 rolls around, and with it the end of that rather huge window of time, but the router is still as dark and black as the monolith from 2001, I called customer support. The guy doesn’t take my complaint seriously, his computer tells him that my connection is still “being worked on”, and that I should wait until 18:00. Which I do, as nothing continues to happen.

At 18:00, I have another service representative take my call, and she lets me know that there was “more work to be done”, and that I should expect to have internet the next day. And that they would likely not need to enter my house, but if that were the case, they would call before driving out. Well, it’s nice to know that they won’t be standing in front of my locked door for nothing, because I’m not going to wait at home another day. I’ll be at the office, and hope to come home to working internet tonight. Either that, or calling the complaints department.

I now have additional questions:

What exactly is going on at the ISP when they connect me to the internet? Are they doing anything other than remotely provisioning the router? What unforeseen delays could possibly push out the anticipated date (communicated two weeks in advance) at last moment’s notice?

Why did I have to call customer support to find out that internet wasn’t coming as promised? They have my phone number and email, how about sending me a quick note informing me of the delay?

1GB free data disappears really fast when you’re using your phone as a hotspot. How does anyone run their home network over 4G “wireless broadband”? Do those deals come without a data cap?