Wi-Fi router died today, Life stopped and all hell broke loose...

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Admit it, we are all slaves of the technology. And in this age internet is like oxygen, one cannot live without it. I never realized internet (or actually the loss of it) could cause so much havoc in the house.
Until today. Today was that unfortunate day when our WiFi router just died.

After coming home from work, things were normal as usual. Kids had come from school and were busy playing games and watching Netflix, Ana was finishing her course work on her laptop. Never did I realize how much data we were consuming every second. And guess who had to keep up with the demand... the poor little WiFi router which was already old and outdated.

I had purchased this WiFi router in the era (2006-07) when only IEEE 802.11a, b and g speed standards existed. IEEE 802.11n did not exist at that time and the devices using wireless internet were few and far between. And these devices of that era were not the data guzzlers like the devices of today. So I can obviously understand how that poor little chap felt when so many data hungry devices tried to connect to it. It had started showing signs of aging every now and then when it used to get hanged and I had to reset it to resume the internet connection. For comparison, today's latest WiFi routers support the latest IEEE 802.11ac speed standard which has expected multi-station WLAN throughput of at least 1 gigabit per second and a single link throughput of at least 500 megabits per second (500 Mbit/s). Now compare that to the old and slow 802.11g which tops out at 54 Mbps. A lot has changed with internet speeds in these years and the latest devices have also excessively bumped up their data sucking capability. So keeping up to that kind of demand was too much for our little old router.

But today I think it had enough and just gave up. Like I said, when I arrived home from work, every thing was going smooth and then suddenly Aryan shouted... Netflix stopped working. Ana said she couldn't open any websites. Linus (the 2 year old... yes he also consumes data... a lot) was clueless as to what had happened and just stared at us.

I thought that it might be the usual router hanging problem, so I went to reset it. But there were no lights on it. I tried to switch it off and on again, nothing. Removed the power chord and plugged it into a different power socket, still nothing. It was dead.
Five-ten minutes had passed during this time and everyone started to get restless. Aryan kept bugging me to bring the internet back. Ana kept cursing the WiFi failure as she had a lot of work to finish. Linus joined Aryan in making sure that I was listening to them and kept asking when the internet would be back.

It was 19:30 when all this was going on. The shops would close at 20:00. The nearest shop to buy a new WiFi router was fifteen minutes drive away. Ana politely requested, "Get your ass out there and get the damn thing to fix the internet".

Next thing I know, I was in the car, hitting the gas as hard as I can to reach the shop before it closes. Just managed to enter the shop door like five minutes before closing time, picked up the new WiFi router, paid the money and out the door in less than 3 minutes. I think I made a personal record for shopping in so less time.

I rushed back home as soon as possible. There were no incidents reported between the time I was out and had left Ana with 2 kids, without Internet. Ana managed to survive.

Then to the next task. Setting up the WiFi router. I started reading the instruction manual. As usual Ana showed her hate for the instruction manuals and just told me to "cut the crap and get the internet working". I still somehow managed to read the instructions and started setting up the router.
But then the next problem. The internet ADSL cable connector was at the entrance door. One of the reasons the older router was spotty was that it was placed at the entrance near the ADSL port. So the signal strength in the living room was very low. Who the hell thought that it would be a great idea to put the ADSL port at the entrance door?

So I decided to dig up my old junk to find a long LAN cable so I can place the WiFi router in the living room. Ana was already getting nervous with the lack of internet and the kids constantly bothering her, and this was just adding fuel to the fire. Before she could loose her cool, I found the long LAN cable and just laid it across the corridor and into the living room. Without bothering to arrange the cable in a neat and tidy fashion, I just let it lay there and focused on getting the WiFi working.



Once the WiFi was back, things got back to normal. Kids stopped shouting and back to their Netflix and games. Ana got back to her work and I got busy putting the LAN cable in place. In around half-an-hour everything was in order.


Then it was my turn to get online and check some news, social updates and write this post. While I was setting up the WiFi router I happened to notice that some one from the neighbors apartment was trying to connect to our WiFi. I immediately changed the password for our WiFi connection and I jokingly changed the name of our SSID (WiFi network name) to this.


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