My feeling is modem, switch, hub, and router get used interchangeably.
When they say one of those words, all you know for sure is that it's a
box with blinky lights and you have to play 20 questions. "What's this
'hub' look like? What color? Any words written on it? Oh it's black
and says Cisco broadband router, ok gotchya."
Like Bill, I always said the modem was outside. At my current job
they've established a precedent of calling the PoE the modem as Nate
suggested. Both approaches work, but calling the PoE injector a modem
makes me cringe internally every time I hear it.
On 11/19/2015 12:44 AM, Ken Hohhof wrote:
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?
