Exasperation, or the new normal?

Hello All
Periodically I have an assessment of how much money we waste on irrelevancies, and am horrified (like my little bat friends who had a rude awakening one sunny day) by our family expenses on communications and internet, and how bad the service is for all the money that they receive from us every month. Recently the signal in our house for cellphone reception has been appalling, Gavin suggested that it may be "too many leaves on the trees".
​Well, I took a moment after that one to work out whether he was pulling my leg, or being serious, as I have heard of leaves on the line making trains late in the uk..... but then leaves are not supposed to be on railway lines. I am fairly certain, however, that they are meant to be on trees. And if Gavin is in fact correct, then what exactly are Orange doing about it. This exasperation should not be interpreted by them however, as a reason to go chopping down all the trees, but more as....... encouragement, that some signal boosters would be most welcome in our vicinity.

The internet is also incredibly slow and unreliable unless it is used before 8 in the morning or after midnight. Our youngest child had been trying to get in touch with her friends during the holidays to organise sleepovers and the like  but was struggling to make skype work properly and was finding it difficult to get her friends to "pick up" as they were not always near their tablets or loaptops, so I introduced her to the fixed line telephone. Now she has used a phone before, don't get me wrong, but it has usually been to answer it to a customer wanting to place an order, or to a telesales person for whom she has no time. So.....I needed to explain that, yes, I had her friends Mums phone number, and that, yes, they would pick up the phone and call her friend for her..... Well!......half an hour later she arrives downstairs and says "wow that was so easy and the signal was so good I could hear her properly and there was no delay". AMAZING!

Our internet signal is in fact so awful that we have 2 options for internet, livebox and satellite, in case it goes off or does not have enough bandwidth to up or download. And we had our internet phone removed as it never worked. It is very difficult to run a business when the phonecall keeps dropping out. And whilst chatting to a friend the other day on the phone she disappeared mid sentence. "What happened there" I said. "O, its just the internet phone dropping out it does it all the time". !!??**  I had heard rumours that the telephone companies might try and phase out fixed lines....God forbid that should ever happen. It would be another step backwards for mankind as far as I am concerned. A bit like taking out all those rail tracks in the 1960's.....

And then there is the telly. I am sure many of you have heard  me moan about satellite telly which goes off during heavy rain. What exactly was wrong with the television aerial anyway? Seemed to work fine for us in the past. Had to unplug it during a thunder storm just the same as you do the livebox. But always worked during heavy rain and high winds.