What is this fascination people have with "modem"? They think they have a
modem, need a modem, reboot their modem, look at the lights on their modem.
Modem, modem, modem. I'd say the term comes up in 50% of all the calls we
get.
I even had a customer call today because they were retiring their old
desktop computer, and wanted to know what to do so their phones, tablets and
laptops would still get Internet. Answer of course is nothing, just unplug
the old beast and get rid of it. But "everyone" told them they needed to
get a modem. So they went to Best Buy, where the kid tells them yes that's
correct, you need a modem, and sold them one. You need to take out that
"power over Ethernet injector" and replace it with a "modem". WTF?
"Modem" seems like "broadband". People use the term like it means something
to them, but if you ask OK what is a modem, what does it do, they haven’t a
clue. But they know they have one, or need to get one. I explain that a
modem is a modulator-demodulator, like when you want to send one type of
signal across a path designed for a different type of signal. Like Internet
across a phone line. But our service is designed to carry digital data, so
we don’t need a modem.
Router on the other hand seems to a term people shy away from. Like it
sounds obscene or something. Which I guess if this were Australia, and you
pronounced it "rooter", would make sense. But the concept seems
straightforward, you have a bunch of devices and the Internet, and the
router is responsible for routing the traffic to the right place. It’s a
router, it routes stuff. Why is that so hard to understand, yet everybody
is comfortable talking about their modem?
- [AFMUG] fascination with the word modem Ken Hohhof
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