I decided to upgrade my internet to fiber. There is one company that does all the fiber for the city of Lecce (Open Fiber). Then there are various companies like TIM, FastWeb that “rent” the fiber. The Open Fiber people came out to bring the fiber into our home. The fiber connects to a device inside called an ONT (Optical Network Terminal) which converts the optical signal into ethernet. An ethernet cable connects that device to the router. The people that installed the fiber and ONT told me that TIM would do the next step of providing a new router and getting it to work and in the meantime my old system would continue to work. But after a few hours it stopped working.

The result was two days without internet and multiple phone calls by various people trying to help me. Everyone we spoke to said something different including, the fiber system was not yet working, we needed a new router, everything was fine. Then finally, someone said I just had to reset the router (one of those small reset buttons you can hardly see). I did that and now everything is working and I have 500megs up and down.

I played a major role in both the development of ethernet and then later the development of broadband internet so I was really frustrating to feel so helpless. I should also say that ChatGPT while giving me a lot of advice never suggested reseting the router.

On the other hand, having Fiber internet in the historic center of Lecce is pretty amazing.