Farmer Focus: The problems caused by a hungry squirrel
Billy Lewis © Richard Swingler We’re in the very fortunate position of having full fibre broadband connection at the farm.
This means that day-to-day administrative tasks that were once painfully slow online can be done instantly.
You get used to this convenience and it very quickly gets taken for granted.
It’s not until something goes wrong that you realise how vital it is to have a reliable connection.
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Last month, we had an issue. A problem on our line caused by a hungry squirrel left us without internet for nearly two weeks.
For the first 48 hours, which happened to be over a weekend, it was actually a bit of a novelty.
Mobile phone signal here is practically non-existent, so as a result we don’t get reliable 4G. This meant we were largely undistracted by the outside world.
We managed to find time to do the little jobs around the house and farmyard that had kept being put off. And it was nice to just be away from the glow of a screen for a while.
However, by Monday morning, the situation quickly turned stressful. The world didn’t stop just because we had no internet.
Bills needed paying, emails weren’t being sent or received, we needed access to the RPA website, online meetings were having to be rescheduled.
Plus a raft of other tasks that needed internet access to complete were impossible.
What made it worse were the endless hours spent on the phone, being passed from pillar to post trying to get the issue resolved.
No one seemed willing to take responsibility or showed any interest in our problem.
After all, we are just one little rural dwelling in the middle of nowhere.
Days without connection started turning into weeks, and eventually we had to resort to making direct contact with the CEO of Openreach.
Once we managed that, we were reconnected the next day.
The whole experience was a stark reminder of how reliant we have become on the internet.
Even in farming, in what could be perceived as a not very tech-heavy industry – which, as we all know, isn’t really the case anymore.
