So Long, and Thanks for All the Transfers

When I last wrote about the small grey box currently mediating my entire relationship with the internet, I ended on a note of quiet, self-sufficient defiance: never mind Cosmote, I said, one doesn't need their cooperation, one simply routes around the problem with a second router and gets on with one's life. This remains true. It was, and is, excellent advice. I would give it again. What I did not anticipate was that roughly a fortnight later I would find myself giving that advice a rest and instead dialling a customer service number with the grim determination of a man who has decided that today, of all days, is the day he finds out whether the phrase "escalate to a supervisor" means anything at all.

It turns out it does, eventually, after enough repetitions that the phrase itself starts to lose meaning, the way any word does if you say it aloud fifty times in a row. What follows is an account of the process, offered partly as catharsis and partly because there is a certain species of reader, and I suspect you may be one of them, who finds genuine comfort in hearing that someone else's call with their ISP also lasted longer than several established international treaties.

 

The Shape of the Phone Tree

I will not attempt to recreate the full transcript, because no one has that kind of stamina, mine included, but I can offer you the shape of it, which turned out to be remarkably consistent across attempts. You call. You are greeted by a menu that assumes, with a confidence that borders on the theological, that your problem is either "no internet at all" or "billing", and offers nothing whatsoever for the actual category of problem, which is "the internet works fine, I simply cannot be trusted to configure four settings on the device that governs it, and I would like different settings than the four I am permitted." There is no button for that. There has never been a button for that. I suspect there never will be, on the grounds that admitting the category exists would require admitting the router was deliberately locked down in the first place, and companies are, as a rule, reluctant to confirm things that make excellent blog material.

So you press the button closest to your actual problem and hope. A human answers, eventually, and is perfectly pleasant, and listens to the explanation of bridge mode and PPPoE passthrough with the polite, unhurried patience of someone reading from a script that does not contain those words. They transfer you. The transfer disconnects the call, not out of malice but out of what I can only assume is a scheduling coincidence so persistent it starts to feel like a design decision. You call back. You explain again, from the beginning, because the queue does not remember you, the agent does not remember you, and the ticket number you were given three calls ago has, by this point, achieved a kind of mythical status: real in principle, unlocatable in practice, referenced by everyone and produced by no one.

 

 

The Turning Point, Such As It Was

What finally worked, after enough calls that I stopped counting somewhere in the low double digits, was not persistence exactly, though persistence was certainly involved. It was reaching someone technical enough to recognise the specific, unglamorous phrase "the router has no admin console, only an app, and the app exposes four settings" as a known issue rather than a customer confusion. The moment that happened, the entire tone of the call changed. No more scripted reassurance that the Wi-Fi name could absolutely be changed if I wanted, thank you, I knew that, I had never doubted it. Instead: a pause, a "let me check something", and then, astonishingly, the beginning of an actual conversation about actual hardware.

The upshot, as it currently stands, is this: Cosmote has agreed, provisionally, cautiously, in the manner of a promise made over the phone rather than a signed contract, to swap the Vantiva box for a different router, one with a proper administrative interface, one where "bridge mode" is a checkbox rather than a mythical creature. With a bit of luck it arrives tomorrow. Later in the week, an engineer is scheduled to come out and physically install a new transceiver before connecting the replacement router, which suggests this is being treated as a genuine hardware swap and not merely a box shipped to my door with a note reading "good luck".

 

Cautious Optimism, Properly Caveated

I want to be careful here, because I have, in a professional capacity spanning several decades, learned that the gap between "the ISP agreed to something on a phone call" and "the ISP did the thing" can be measured in weeks, missed appointments, and at least one further round of the exact phone tree described above. Nothing is confirmed until the engineer is standing in my hallway with the correct hardware in a box, and even then I reserve the right to discover that the replacement router has its own, differently shaped set of arbitrary restrictions, because ISPs the world over share a certain instinct for finding new and creative ways to lock a box down even after conceding the previous lock was unreasonable.

But provisionally, cautiously, and with fingers very deliberately crossed: it looks like the honest answer to a locked-down ISP router might not have to be "route around it forever" after all. Sometimes it's "keep calling until you reach the one person who already knows the problem exists, then let them fix it properly." That's a less satisfying moral than "route around corporate intransigence with sheer technical competence," I'll grant you, but it has the considerable advantage of possibly, actually, working. I'll report back once there's a router in the house and an engineer's van has come and gone. Until then: don't panic, and if you're on hold, it does eventually end.

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