Telekom support is exemplary

At first, I didn’t have time for troubleshooting. Although the reconnection happened more than ten times a day, it was so fast that we usually didn’t notice it. But someone who did notice was Deutsche Telekom. Three days after the problems started, I received a text message. Deutsche Telekom had noticed that we were having a problem with our connection. They wanted to help us and said we should call the hotline.

To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised: Proactive communication with a customer who’s having problems—where do you even find that anymore? However, the timing was inconvenient: we were leaving for vacation three days later, and I didn’t want to head to Italy with a half-finished troubleshooting session. So I ignored the text and spent the next three weeks lying on the beach.

The problem didn’t magically disappear

Three weeks later, I was curious. Maybe it was an external issue that had been resolved? No, unfortunately, it wasn’t. On the contrary, the problem had actually gotten worse and was now becoming annoying. I was getting kicked out of meetings while working from home, GeForce Now would get interrupted, VoIP calls would drop, and so on.

I had already mentally prepared myself for the call with Telekom. But first, I thought about what could be causing the problem. I quickly made the connection to moving the FRITZ!Box. The obvious assumption was that something went wrong during the move. First, I checked the router’s temperatures. Maybe it wasn’t getting enough air on top of the cabinet? No, that wasn’t it.

But the cable from the phone jack to the router was now hanging in the air, instead of lying relaxed behind the TV stand. The router was five meters away from the phone jack—which was the maximum length of the cable.

A shot in the dark, and a direct hit

The cable is old and came with the router. My guess was that the cable’s quality wasn’t particularly high, and accordingly, it didn’t react well to being stretched taut in the air.

So before I had a Telekom technician come over, I thought it was worth a try. I quickly ordered a longer cable on Amazon and made sure the quality was good. Instead of a cheap wire, I chose a cable made of pure copper. It was ten meters long, twice as long as before.

What can I say? The cable was delivered, I replaced the old one with the new one, and restarted the connection. There hasn’t been a single disconnect since. Sometimes, it’s just a cheap old cable. Even if they all look the same on the outside, a proper cable can make a significant difference. And it can save you a phone call with Deutsche Telekom.