Thanksgiving night I got a Facebook message from someone who recently moved. They asked me if i wire houses for internet service. Lack of Ethernet ports were also mentioned in the walls. We arranged a site survey and when I arrived they showed me the house and the one ethernet port they had in the kitchen. I looked in the garage for any network equipment and finding none, looked on the outside of the house and found an old frontier junction box. I checked
Questions were asked and my new client said frontier or comcast aren’t their internet providers. They have service through a company which works through T-mobile Cellular towers. I asked if they had any equipment and they showed me a wireless cellular/wifi router. We fired it up with electrical power and with my Apple laptop I configured it with the paperwork they had.
This router has a SIM card just like a smartphone and I discovered my client had inserted it upside down. Once this was corrected, the front panel internet LED lit which hadn’t till now. My laptop got a WiFi signal and so did my client on their smartphone. We both could cruise the internet on our devices. My client doesn’t need Ethernet wiring in his house since the internet service is all through WiFi and his devices all use the same technology,
Asking questions saved my client time and money because they thought they needed Ethernet cabling and jacks ran throughout the house. This gets expensive. My client just needed his wireless device configured correctly and they didn’t show it to me until I asked the right questions.