Finally, After Six Years…WiFi

Learning to deal with Italian Utility Companies

2019:

Carol and Roger left Pienza for the Summer to spend time with family and friends in Seattle. During our absence, there was a thunderstorm. A lightning strike hit the power line feeding our street. The power surge fried computers, television sets, and any other appliance left on during the storm.

Unbeknownst to us, one of the casualties of this lightning strike was our WiFi router. The utility company promptly sent out a crew to restore service to everybody who reported an outage. Since we were in Seattle and unaware of the storm, we never reported a problem and so did not get our service repaired.

We returned to Pienza to find our phone line dead and our WiFi router fried. We called TIM (our provider of cell and internet service at the time). They promised to send out a repair team. After several more phone calls and a 6 week wait, we had an Italian friend make a more insistent call. Despite repeated promises, the TIM repair crew never showed up.

2020:

The year of the COVID pandemic. We hunkered down in Seattle and never made it to Pienza.

2021:

We gave up on TIM and tried another provider. It worked…but the “travel router” they provided was painfully slow, dropped data connections during high demand, and was generally unsatisfactory.

2023:

The company is a hardware wholesaler, providing infrastructure for 32 different service providers. We got to take our pick.

Our next door neighbors had just contracted with Vodafone for high speed internet service. The fiber optic cable entered their house 25 meters from ours. How hard could it be to extend the service one more house? We chose Vodafone to be our service provider.

The techs went around the block, buzzed the doorbell at that neighbor’s gate, and asked for permission to replace the circuit board inside the box. Our neighbor exploded in curses (even though Roger’s Italian is limited, he had no problem getting the drift of this tirade). The neighbor said he would call the Carabinieri (national police) if the techs so much as set foot on his property.

The techs called Vodafone…who told them to give up and move on to their next assignment. It mattered not that another working internet feed was just a few meters away.

2025:

Out of pure frustration using our cell phones as internet hot spots, Roger gave Fiber One another try. If there were 32 available vendors, perhaps he could find one that would be willing to extend the fiber optic cable to our house from next door.

As luck would have it, Fiber One sent the same technician out who was the subject of our neighbor’s tirade two years before. We explained we wanted to extend the cable from next door.

The call to Enel produced better results. If we would dig a trench and bury conduit, Enel would allow Fiber One to extend the cable into our yard.

It turns out, our back yard was in the middle of a complete remodel (note the new walkway that had just been set down). Maurizio, our neighbor and the stone mason who was doing the remodel, said he would dig the trench and lay the conduit. Of course, it turned out more complicated than we thought.

After digging the trench and laying the conduit, Maurizio had to cut out the steps he had just installed (see black arrow above), burrow under the steps, then burrow under the newly-laid walkway.

Now, all we have to do is remember to unplug the router when leave Pienza for any length of time. We never want to go through this adventure again.