So you have WiFi broadband? Probably not…

So you have WiFi broadband? Probably not…

It’s a common misconception that we hear a lot. So what and why? To explain I need to go into some brief details on how you actually use ‘The Internet’.

‘The Internet’ (at least the bit you use) is best thought of as a long chain of separate links. They all have to work in harmony, or you won’t be able to use the system. Let’s look at a (very simplified) example: you want to look at the BBC website.

 

  1. You type ‘bbc.co.uk’ into your web browser.
  2. Your laptop processes this and works out you need an Internet connection.
  3. According to it’s rules the laptop passes the request onto your LAN (Local Area Network) connection.
  4. Your LAN connection contacts your router/hub and forwards the request.
  5. Your router/hub acts according to it’s rules and sends your request to its WAN (Wide Area Network) connection.
  6. The WAN connection sends this request down the cable(?) that connects your house to your provider’s exchange unit.
  7. The exchange unit takes your message (along with many other customers’ requests) and relays them along the (increasingly high capacity) web of transmission systems that is the backbone of The Internet.
  8. At the appropriate point your message exits the Internet backbone and passes up the local cable to the BBC’s server facility.
  9. In this facility it passes through the appropriate firewalls & routers until it arrives at the server hosting the BBC website.
  10. This web server looks at your request, chooses the appropriate content. And them sends this back – essentially reversing down the path I have just described above.

Now, in all of this, your ‘Broadband’ or ‘Internet connection’ is just Step 6 – the bit that connects the router in your house to the exchange of your ISP (Internet Service Provider. And, overwhelmingly, this is delivered via a cable: either copper or – increasingly – optical fibre. The only people who have “Wireless Broadband” are cu

stomers of specialist services, like AirBand or Elon Musk’s StarLink. Otherwise you don’t have ‘wireless broadband’!

There is other alternative. You can use the mobile phone data network (a.k.a. 4G or 5G) to provide the link between your

router and the Internet. This is also a form of ‘wireless broadband’. We use this quite often to provide backup Internet connections where the cabled connection is unreliable or undergoing maintenance.

So where does this misconception come from? The answer is straightforward. Most devices these days (smartphones, tablets, many laptops) make the connection to your router (Step 4) using WiFi. And so users use the shorthand ‘WiFi broadband’.

And another thing. Look at the list above (which is somewhat shortened for simplicity!). It’s a sequential chain, and it only moves as fast as the slowest link. So when a user says “my broadband is slow” it could be any one (or more) of these links – most of which neither they (nor us) have any influence over. King Canute had it right, and I bow to his wisdom!

Deco WiFi7 MESH units. Very nice. Very expensive.

Wi-Fi 7 is here

WiFi 7 is here. The latest & greatest standard, offering lots of wondefulness.

Should you upgrade? Probably not. If that sounds a bit killjoy, let me explain. For most people (at home or in the office) their perception of computer speed is governed primarily by the responsiveness of their PC when accessing the Internet. Websites, email, social media – it’s all delivered via ‘The Internet’. And the thing is that the delivery pipeline is a chain – and it’s only as fast as the slowest link. I know people are going to say ‘it’s not all about speed’. And they’re correct. Thing is though that – for 99% of the people 99% of the time – it IS all about speed. And here’s the inconvenient truth: it’s great that the new WiFi7 has a data-rate of 46Gbps (which it does) – but if your broadband feed is only 0.5Gbps. then 45.5Gbps of your WiFi capacity is going unused. In addition it’s unlikely that any of your current equipment (laptops / PCs) support WiFi7, so it’s a complete waste of time.

Or is it?

There are, of course, people for whom this upgrade does make sense. One of the most useful improvements is the increased performance when sharing the WiFi with many devices in the office. Generally the performance for everyone degrades rapidly when the bandwith cake starts getting sliced too thin. WiFi7 promises to be more generous here.

And there are a bunch of intereting & usefull – if somewhat technical – improvements here as well But (and it’s a big but) – it’s expensive. The 3-pack in the image is £1000. Yes, a grand. You have got to be really sure it’s going to enhance your life before splashing that much cash!

I’m not joking. OK, a little bit.

Logitech mouse

A Logitech mouse – just like mine!

I’m really not sure what to make of this. I’m keeping an eye on a seemingly preposterous story centred on Logitech. These are the people who make mice & keyboards (amongst other stuff generically known as ‘peripherals’). We like their mice & keyboards a lot – we use practically nothing else.

The story kicks off with the Logitech CEO being interviewed by a tech YouTuber. During which the idea of a “forever mouse” came up. After a bit of digging it transpired that the concept was that you’d never need to replace your mouse because it would be kept up-to-date with constant software updates. After a LOT more digging the CEO finally admitted to the idea being based on a subscription model – yes, that’s right! A monthly charge to use your mouse.

The mind boggles. Gamers might disagree, but a mouse is a mouse. I have never, ever, thought “oh, I wonder if there is a software update for my mouse?”. If I replace my mouse it’s because a button has broken, or the thing is so filthy I can’t stand it any longer. Not, ever, because it’s software is out-of-date! Even the improvements sought by gamers are likely to be mechanical (sensors & stuff) which isn’t remediated by a software update.

Oh great! More stuff to update – just want to send a quick email? Oh no, the mouse is updating. And we now have to pay for this inconvenience!

But now comes the frantic back-pedalling. Logitech now say that the ‘Forever Mouse’ was never a thing. Which is nice. So, what gives? No idea. Maybe we look no further than the old saw ‘all publicity is good publicity’.

An easy trap to fall into

No apologies for going back to the subject of mail compliance. And this time it’s an obvious and easy trap that you could fall into when configuring your SPF record.

The SPF record for Back Office It

The SPF record for Back Office It

By way of explanation, your SPF record is something you publish: it contains a list of the server(s) that you have authorised to send out your emails. When we send out an email from backofficeit.co.uk the recipient looks at the source server, checks it against our published SPF list, and gives it the go/no-go based on what it finds. In this way recipients are protected against ‘spoof’ emails (scammers pretending to be us). The trap comes when you use Microsoft365 (Office365) for your emails. Your SPF record is now spf.protection.outlook.com – which sounds fine. But every other Office365 user on the planet comes off the same server. So the SPF record check does NOT say “this is definitely from backofficeit.co.uk”. It simply says “this is from an Office365 user & Office365 is good for backofficeit.co.uk”. Which is not where you want to be at all!

The solution is to use an outbound mail relay. The one we have partnered with has many useful features. But, in this case, it has its own SPF identity. And, as part of their system, they monitor for exactly the scenario we are guarding against: therefore we use that instead of the Office365 one. And now the receiver can say with much higher confidence that this email is really from us.

 

 

Did they really think that they could get away with it?

On Jan. 12, 2023, Intel announced full details and availability for the new 13th Gen Intel Core i9-13900KS. A photo shows the ​​13th Gen Intel Core i9-13900KS Special Edition retail packaging. (Credit: Intel Corporation)

Apparently so. We’re talking about Intel and the fiasco over their latest chips. To cut a long story short, Intel launched its latest chips (13th & 14th Generation CPUs) to the usual fanfare & premium prices. Only for some users to find that these chips were, in some cases, slowly failing. What was happening is that the chip was not regulating its own electrical power properly, and bit by bit it was cooking itself. Intel quickly released a software patch that prevents this happening. But, crucially, if you have already experienced the problem then tough luck – the damage is permanent. And Intel announced that this was just on certain batches, your bad luck, so sorry, never mind. Which isn’t nice, as the i9 illustrated above is the wrong side of £600 – assuming you can get one.

Now, however, that have (in small part) backed down. You can read about it here.

Maybe the fact that Intel is laying off 15,000 staff might be connected in some way. Maybe not. But here is another product that clearly has not been rigorously tested before being flogged to the paying public.

And before you get too smug looking at your AMD chip, have a read here…

20% of the world’s computers offline?

Some shouty headlines tell us that 20% of the world’s computers were taken down by the CrowdStrike problem. Well, not really. Microsoft say the true figure is about 8.5 million – still a lot, but closer to 1% than 20%.

So, what & why? CrowdStrike is a high-end PC protection suite (think anti-virus and more) which is supposed to protect key Windows systems from falling foul of the bad guys & maintain high levels of availability. Oh, the irony.

On 19 July CrowdStrike released an update for its software. Due to an error in the update millions of Windows PCs around the world crashed. The reason it was so devastating is in the innocent phrase ‘high-end’. This meant it was a favourite for important systems, such as banks, airlines and so on. Hence the huge impact on the public & the economy. Read up on it here.

But here’s my question. Why is none of this stuff tested properly? Call me old fashioned, but if I wrote a bit of code that caused my test PC to go into a permanent sulk I’d probably think twice before punting it out to 8,500,000 customers.

We’re seeing more of this. Products that break almost as soon as they are out of the box. Clearly they haven’t been tested in anything like a rigorous manner. It seems that, in this post-truth world, testing is old-fashioned, restrictive, time-consuming & expensive. And, conveniently for the bottom line, can be dispensed with. Trip to see the Titanic in an untested & unlicensed submarine anyone? I’m sure there were loads of people who thought it was cool & modern to sidestep all the boring testing & validation mandated for these things. Not so much now, eh?

It’s not as popular as they thought!

For a decade now suppliers have been fixated with the ‘subscription model’ of commerce. This was based on one of the most frequently violated rules of statistics – you can interpolate but not extrapolate.

It all seems to have started with the mobile phone boom – which, in the early days, saw the cost of the handset bundled into the monthly subscription for the phone service. And, so they reasoned, the public would be equally keen to buy pretty much everything else on the subscription model. Yea! Regular income! The added bonus (from their point of view) was the amount of personal data they could harvest along the way.

The public, however, were not so keen. We noticed the almost total resistance from clients over moving to Office365. Why, they reasoned, should they pay hundreds of pounds per month for a product that they had, historically bought outright?

But some companies took it even further. Our least-favourite printer manufacturer (HP) produced printers that were online 24/7 spying on you, automatically ordering consumables and snitching to Big Brother should you attempt to use compatible toners. And, in the early days, stopping the printer if you persisted. All the while plundering your bank account month in, month out.

Well, the public was less than enthusiastic – and HP have finally given up. Read the story here.

Copper switch-off delayed.

To our complete lack of surprise, BT/OpenReach have announced that they have delayed the final switch off of the traditional phone lines (so-called ‘analogue’ or ‘copper’ phone lines). The grand plan was that all voice telephony would be delivered over your Internet connection by the end of 2025. The technical name for this is VOIP (Voice Over IP). When this plan was announced in 2021 anyone with any real-world knowledge knew it was unachievable. There were just too many connections to deal with – not to mention all the specialist services that only work on the copper. Like RedCare & emergency buttons for the elderly. Plus, of course, OpenReach’s ghastly reputation for not delivering the quality of broadband essential for voice communications.

And here we are. Bowing to the inevitable, OpenReach has pushed back the deadline by 13 months. That’s still ‘ambitious’. We shall see. My money is on a series of further delays as reality seeps in bit by bit.

You can read the BBC article here.

Having said that, if (and it’s a big if) you have the broadband to support it, voice telephony delivered over the Internet is very good, and very cheap. The system we use has been into our office for many years, and it works well. If you are interested talk to us about it. Call us on 01905 426365 (yes, it’s a VOIP line!)