Speechless

In the continuing saga of trying to get internet access to our apartment, today a colleague of mine called Fastweb, from which I had ordered DSL, to see what was going on. As you might recall, the last time the Telecom was here, they said that they would have to lay a line up to our apartment from the ground floor. Fastweb now said that the Telecom had told them that they had not been physically able to lay that cable (apparently they were here sometime last week – and Fastweb said that they would have called me “today” to let me know). My colleague said that something similar had been the case when he got internet, and that in the end his landlady had an electrician come and do it himself. Encouraged by that, I had him call my landlord to tell him about the situation and see what he could do. The landlord said he’d investigate, but thought the Telecom story was a little strange since the two other apartments right next to ours have a telephone line already installed. Apparently he called the Telecom to find out what the deal was and called me back a short time later. Being the former monopolist they are, the Telecom seems to have decided that it will only install 20 lines per building for other companies, and we were number 21 or so. In other words, they will not install our telephone line unless we go through them (and pay the 96 Euro or so installation fee). Our options at this point are therefore to go through them for landline and internet, just pay for the expensive installation and then get a different company for internet (and telephone), or call the whole thing off and get an (also expensive) USB modem through a mobile phone company. None of these options sound especially attractive, but we’ll have to choose one if we want internet. I still wonder how something like this can be legal…