Hey guys, it’s me again (I know, it’s been forever, she keeps reminding me…)
Wifi is one of those things that literally everyone (unless you’ve been living under a rock, I guess) uses every single day. But really, how many people think about how their home network is set up? Or the kind of equipment that goes into creating the Netflix stream to the Chromecast? Sure, I’ve thought about it, but I never really did anything about it until last week…
To make this a long story short, we’ve had the same router in our house (technically it’s my parent’s house but we try not to think about that too hard) for almost 13 years. While technology changes pretty fast, most people fall into the “it still works fine, why should we get a new one?” mentality. Maybe the lights blink, maybe the router still emits a signal, but I’m sorry, having to restart your router every few hours, and having to disconnect your laptop from the wifi so it’ll let your phone connect is not okay.
The lady at Linksys laughed at me when I told her the model number of our router, that’s how bad it is.
A few days ago, right before bed, our router decided to just die, no warning (besides the years of it being kind of special). Everyone in the house suddenly wasn’t able to connect to wifi and everyone was freaking out a bit. November and I usually sleep with Netflix playing on our TV as background noise so I had to set up a mobile hotspot with my phone and connect our Chromecast to that (she really won’t go to sleep without Netflix on). Good thing my parents pay for a 20 GB data plan.
I spent all of the next morning on the phone with Linksys and Comcast to make sure it wasn’t the router. That day we made a trip to Best Buy (unfortunately the only tech store around us) and purchased a Linksys AC1750 EA7300 router.
Let me tell you, the difference is night and day. We’ve had it for about 5 days now and we haven’t had to reset it even once, we have almost 12 devices connected to it at all times with no issues, and we’re actually getting the internet speeds that we’re paying for.
Moral of the story: don’t keep using your decade old technology just because “it still works just fine”. Odds are, it doesn’t work fine at all but you’ve gotten used to its little quirks and strange bugs features.
Catch you later – E
Team Santana 