Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Bill: I was reading the manual that came with my new IP camera and it referred to both public IP addresses and private IP addresses.
I got the camera working just fine but now I’m curious about the difference between public and private IP addresses.
Can you clear it up for me?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Is your Internet connection really as fast as your ISP claims it is?
In reality, the answer should be yes (or at least fairly close).
Since there are many factors that affect the average speed of a typical high speed Internet connection, it’s unlikely that your actual upload and download speeds to will match your plan’s advertised speeds exactly.
But that being said, there shouldn’t be a whole lot of daylight between the two.
Question from Rod: I received a flyer in the mail from Xfinity saying everyone in my area now has the option to upgrade our Internet service to 1200Mbps with virtually no increase in the monthly charges.
I’d love to do that because that would be a huge increase from the 200Mbps I’m getting now, but I can’t afford to buy a new modem.
I bought the modem I have now four years ago and it’s still working great.
My question is will I need to buy a new modem in order to get the full 1200Mbps speed that comes with this new plan? [Read more…]
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
Question from James: My wife has accepted an offer from her employer to work remote from home.
She will be setting up her office in a small 12′ x 15′ detached guest cottage that’s approximately 75 feet from our house.
Our cable modem and router are in our living room.
Since the cottage is separate from our living space we do not have the ability to just run a long Ethernet cable and phone cable from the router to that space.
The cottage gets a very weak Wi-Fi signal from our router but she has to have a wired Ethernet connection in order to use the devices she has.
What essentially I’m asking is should she set up her own internet service in that room and have the ISP just hardwire the space? [Read more…]
The amount of information available on the Internet with just a few clicks of the mouse boggles the mind.
If all that info was published in a single book it would probably be thick enough to reach all the way to the moon.
That’s why Google and other Internet search engines are so important for helping us find the info we need in a timely manner.
But a single web page can hold a lot of information as well, and if you need to find something on a large, congested page it can be like finding a needle in a haystack. [Read more…]