Network Complications

 Like most people here in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, I have become overly dependent on my home wireless network, and as a result I have a lot of—arguably too many—devices connected to it, including four laptops, two tablets, two printers a smart phone, three Roku boxes, two Google Home devices, and a half dozen smart plugs. It's probably little wonder that my wireless router recently a little flaky and failure prone, randomly dropping devices. A quick unplug and re-plug would correct things, but who wants to be doing that several times a day?

I'm not sure whether it was out of frustration or desperation,  or despair, but I reached the point last week where I felt the need to take decisive action, so I replaced my wireless router. Physically disconnecting and reconnecting the cables only took a couple of minutes, and setting up the new wireless network took a couple more, but getting everything back registered on the network has taken several days. 

In all fairness, I got most of it—the laptops, tablets, Roku boxes, printers and Google Home devices—done in an hour or so, but the Kasa smart plugs proved the most vexing of all. Despite the simplicity of their operation, the setup routine is anything but. The plugs must be set up using the Kasa smartphone app, and the on-screen instructions are less than accurate. To put it into perspective, I have a master's degree in technical communication and I couldn't properly follow the steps as written. 

Where they fell short was in the crucial step of registering the plugs on the new network. The instruction said to "join the network," but failed to make clear that this was accomplished by finding the plug as an unsecured network, then joining that to the router's network. This had to be done for each plug. As if that weren't enough, my Google Home devices still did not recognize the plugs until I reset them again, after I had gotten the plugs working.

To be sure, this is not the first time I've changed out a wireless router. This has got to be the seventh or eighth time I've done it. But over the past three or so years, the sheer number of things connected to it, both via the 802.11 wireless protocol and physically via Ethernet cables, has expanded phenomenally. The router is no longer just a jumping on point for a wireless Internet connection; it is now a central technological fixture of my home, enabling so many other things to function. As far as I can see, this role will only expand in the future.