I’m away on a training course this week and staying in a rather nice two-bedroom apartment in an old manor house-type thing (I think it might be Edwardian judging by the windows)  on the bank of the Thames with a colleague.

The place is covered with wi-fi which is pretty essential if you’re away from home even if it is barely faster than dial-up.  But dial-up would have been an improvement over the broadband last night and today.

The signal strength was fine but the connection to the outside world was dropping every few minutes so I went to the site office to report it.  As I walked into the office I saw someone vaguely techy looking standing in the doorway to a broom cupboard filled with servers, switches and wi-fi routers.  Ah-ha, I thought, they’ve got someone on the case already.  But no, he wasn’t a techy at all and was, in fact, merely holding the door open so that the electric fan that they’d stood in there pointing at the rack could do its job of cooling the cupboard down!

It’s been a rather toasty, globally warmed 30 degrees celsius down here in Surrey and it appears that the broom cupboard they are using as a server room is not only unventilated but doesn’t have aircon either.  By the time I got back to the apartment the internet seemed to be behaving so they either threw a web monkey at it in super-quick time or their wi-fi router doesn’t run well when it’s hot enough to fry and egg on it and the fan was doing the job.

Either way, I’m connected to the outside world again and I’ll appreciate my 20mbit broadband at home a little bit more when I get back.