Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Home Networking


The family thought it would be best to put a password on our wireless router. Otherwise anybody can use our Internet. The family thinks this slows us down as other people are leeching onto our Internet access. Maybe they are right. Maybe they are not. I told the family it would be fine by me to put on the password.

The problem was that we have an old wireless router. The software to control it does not work on any of our computers. Little Kat thought we should buy a newer and more modern wireless router. He came with a printout of a bandwidth anaylsis he got online. To him, this proved that the wireless router was the problem.

This made for a good engineering case study. I drew some pictures. Showed the devices in our house, our wireless router, our cable mode, the cable, and the cable company. Then I showed Little Kat what bandwidth rate we were paying our Internet Service Provider for. I also showed him the documentation for the wireless router. It was educational.

The bottleneck is surely not the wireless router. However I did purchase a new router that works with all modern operating systems. Now Little Kat is working to get that new router working. He tells me he thinks it is much faster. We are going to teach this cat some network analysis some day.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes I agree! Its very educational! XD

I thought the service provider provides the password for the wireless? Or that's just for the new contracts?

Black Cat said...

No the wireless router is the customer's device. So we set up and maintain the password. The kids are excited about the new router with encryption. They think it means faster download speeds.