I had a call from an elderly neighbour last week to help her out with her 'internet' :)

An overseas relative turned up last month, bought her a laptop, signed her up for broadband and then buggered off leaving her to deal with everything. She's found it incredibly stressful because she struggles with concentration after having had a stroke a few years ago. She contacted VF because the modem kept flashing at her telling her the line had a fault. They assured her it was all ok from their end and she should 'call someone in to help'.

I went around this morning to find the modem plugged in correctly, her laptop connecting to it ok but an almost unusable connection. The modem said there was an issue with the line and speedtest.net returned 1.56Mbps down. I called the 0508 number but the line would not ring and after 30 seconds I would hear a recorded message saying 'This page cannot be displayed' and then the line would go dead. I tried several times and on one occasion it rang. There was then a 'welcome to Vodafone, please hold' message and then the line went dead. I could call my mobile ok, and she was on the phone to a friend when I arrived, so I wasn't sure what was happening.

I then put the modem on a different phone jack to find a ST John Ambulance dongle on the phone line. I've never seen one before, it looked like the old line filters you get with the modems. She said she had some kind of alarm but couldn't tell me anything about it. So I plugged the modem in with a filter, and put the ST John 'thing' into the filter as well. The phone still worked, but now the modem was giving 8.1Mbps and the laptop was working fine.

Obviously the other phone jack is useless and we can leave the modem on the new one but not having seen this ST John dongle before is there something else I should check ? 

Is there anyone from VF who would be happy to talk to me rather than my neighbour? I can initiate the call from her house if need be and she can vouch for me at the time. I know her account number etc. I would just like to find out what's going on without worrying her too much. She called me on Saturday asking if the modem would catch fire if she left it on over night ;)