Nothing new in Taunus: thunderstorms all around Jarltech's headquarters in Usingen. There was thunder and lightning non-stop and this had to happen at some point: lightning struck not far away and all companies of the neighbourhood were knocked-out, internet-wise.

It quickly became clear that the loss of our fibre optic internet connection must somehow be connected to the lightning strike. With a night-time call at Telekom, we learned that there was a problem with the lines, but that there were no need to worry and that we could go home, everything would be operational again shortly. Not so, unfortunately. And Telekom were not at top form either. Note that we are not talking about a standard DSL line here, we are talking about our fibre optic lifeline.

As the internet was gone overnight, a technician came at 8 AM the next morning and confirmed that our internet was gone. However, the fibre optic cable to Frankfurt was intact. Everything is fine, I thought, the problem will be fixed soon then.

That is what I thought ... until the technician packed up, saying: "I am only in charge of the fibre optic network availability. The problem here seems to be the router and that's not my responsibility. A local colleague will contact you shortly." Unfortunately, it was impossible to call this colleague, so we started our emergency procedures to secure our shipping capability. At least, that worked like a charm -- no wonder, as it is not Telekom who make our deliveries. Well, there is nothing to be done about. Not until noon finally the second Telekom guy arrived, checked the router and made his diagnosis: "The router is probably defective; it reacts neither to internal nor to external requests and needs to be replaced." We already knew that. Just give us a replacement router! Telekom answers: "We don't have one, only in Hanover." Great. Not only do we have contracts with courier services, we could also go and get it within the hour with Jarltech's jet. The commiserate employee of the T-Club tried to explain us why it would unfortunately not be possible to conciliate this with their own processes and stated that the router may only be delivered by Telekom's own courier service. Additionally, it must also stop over in Gießen to be configured, which ate up even more precious time. They could e-mail and upload it, but no way, the configuration is "secret".

Our administrator's offers to support the Telekom guys with getting the router from the specialist shop around the corner or to fly the T-Com router in from Hanover, or even to configure it ourselves via Telekom's phone support were all refused. That is disappointing, especially as this line alone yearly costs us a five digit sum. And all assertions as to when which problem would be solved were just so short every time that it would not have been worth it to switch to our backup line from Arcor.

At last, there was a happy ending when a very friendly Telekom employee finally showed up at 8 PM, bringing us the last Cisco module available in Germany, which was found to be the cause of the failure. The module was then replaced within 5 minutes by his trainee and placed back into the rack. After exactly 15 minutes and a call with Telekom central support, internet was available again. This should have happened much faster! What upsets me is that you are powerless, because you cannot call anyone at Telekom. All the technicians hide their phone numbers. They are all very friendly and competent, but they hide themselves. We thought only the CIA would hide their caller number nowadays.

Of course, we also must hold ourselves accountable. While we have a couple of internet providers for emergencies, as well as a replacement for every in-house router and server, this one, mysterious Telekom router was the weak spot, with no backup. This cannot be -- I wonder if it is possible to get another one from Telekom, because if we had one, we would also have that top secret configuration twice. It would even be sufficient if Telekom were to stock one fibre optic router in the Frankfurt area.

A router that costs as much as a second-hand medium-sized car obviously is not helpful as long as its configuration is locked away at Telekom. Only them, and probably the NSA, know these ultra-secret data.

Dear Telekom, there is room for improvement!