A solution emerges from the Ether

Why do ISPs overlook the obvious wired solution to many home broadband problems? Barry thinks he knows the answer

- Barry Collinsis

It can’t be much fun working on a broadband support desk. Call after call from irate customers, threatening to cancel their direct debit because the connection has “gone down again” or they’re “not getting the promised speed”. And that’s just the calls from me.

It must be even more galling for the human anger-sponges answering the calls that many of these problems could be easily avoided, if only the providers they work for educated their customers on the benefits of Ethernet.

For a vast chunk of consumers, the internet is Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi is the internet. The two are interchangeable. And that’s understandable when you consider that every time a company such as BT suffers a major network outage, you see headlines reporting “BT Wi-Fi down”, even though it’s nothing to do with Wi-Fi.