I feel your pain

On a day set aside to honor the memory of one who sought to remove barriers by calling upon all of his countrymen to truly live up to their ideals, and on the day before another who walked the path he helped make takes the oath of office as president...well, leave it up to me to come here and write about a subject apparently having nothing whatever to do with any of the above.

Anyway, I've just had to replace my router for the first time since unwiring my humble abode more than six years ago, and the experience has given me some insight into what some of the hotspot operators we've taken to task here over the years may have encountered. The radio conking out on my venerable old 802.11b access point led me to go out and pick up a name-brand "draft-N" model (just as an aside, the 802.11n standard-already five years late-is supposedly to be finalized by the end of this year, leading one to ask where we've heard that before) on sale for $40, or about one-third what I paid for its predecessor back in '02. Given more than half a decade, you'd think there'd have been some progress by the manufacturers to make configuration of one of these things easier for an end user, wouldn't you?

Well, think again.

After maybe a half-dozen attempts to simply change the router's default IP address (which I had to do because it was the same as my DSL modem, which, suffice it to say, wasn't going to work), change the SSID and enable WPA, I gave up and went to bed. The next morning, after fortifying myself with a good breakfast, I trudged once more unto the breach, and decided just for the sake of it to try what the quick-setup sheet suggested as a prerequisite for using the built-in setup "wizards"-power everything off, hook it all up and then power back on in sequence. Wonder of wonders, it worked. It's been up for a couple of days now without a hiccup, so I guess I can uncross my fingers. It just would have been nice for the manufacturer to specify that powering off and connecting everything was necessary for manual setup as well, that's all.

Which brings me to those other hotspots. I can only imagine what some businessperson-especially these days-must think when he or she runs into problems like these. It's got to make them wonder if offering Wi-Fi is still worth it. And bear in mind that what I've related above involves consumer-grade equipment. I shudder to think what anyone running a big location with an enterprise-class router might be faced with. No doubt some of the no-longer-hot spots we've run into were the result of experiences like this.

Get a clue, manufacturers. The easier you make your gear to set up and use, the more people will be inclined to set up and use it. And it might serve to remember that in order to do that, they'll have to buy it first. Money and resources invested in making your documentation clear and concise-and meaningful to people who make their living in fields other than IT-should be seen as an investment in both your future and ours.

In keeping with the theme of today and tomorrow, it's all about removing barriers and encouraging others to walk the path.