 Think Tech Away. Civil Engagement lives here. Thanks for joining us at Supporting Your Tech. My name is Greg Jackson. I'll be your host today. I'm with Matt Darnell, the owner of Comtel. Thanks for joining us. Good to be here. This is, as a part of your host, I'm going to be helping with the mini-series that we have for going through Networking 101. We're going to be talking about routers today. The first part will be a little bit of the current events, and the second part will be the routers itself. Before the show, you and I were talking about jokes. Did you have a joke? A joke? Yeah. If not, that's okay. What goes oom, oom, oom? A cow walking backward. Awesome. Does that count? That counts. You can tell that one at Thanksgiving Day dinner. I was going to tell you a joke about UDP, but I didn't think you'd get it. Right. You're not sure if I would get it. I might get it or I might not. Nobody knows. That's for all you nerds out there. I got it. I like it. I like it. So this is... I don't want a 10. I give it. No, it's a seven. Well, you know my value. I like that one a lot. Just so you know, folks, this show is to help viewers like you simplify tech and help you feel comfortable about making IT decisions in your business. So let's just start off with current events. And Matt, I know you've got a list of stuff you want to talk about. What's on your mind? Okay. Well, first, did you hear, you know, Elon Musk, he's the guy behind Tesla, and he's selling a flamethrower. And I really thought it was a joke. I mean, I spent probably 30 minutes researching it, looking at it. And the company that's selling it, it's called The Boring Company. And I thought, oh, as opposed to the exciting company, but The Boring Company is actually, you know, he's building that tunnel. Was it from LA to San Francisco? He's building an underground train, high-speed train. So did you order your flamethrower? No, I actually saw some flamethrowers on YouTube and there's some pretty crazy stuff out there. Is it stuff crazy? It's supposed to be legal. Apparently, if it's... if the flame goes less than 10 feet, it's not considered like a weapon. I can see how that'd be legal. Right? Hello. Anyway, so go to theboringcompany.com and they sold 20,000 of these flamethrowers. I thought that was pretty interesting. What kind of fuel do they use? Flamethrower fuel. Oh, okay. Yeah. It's like JPA or something. Right, exactly. Yeah, absolutely. And in shocking news, Microsoft paid for a study and Edge beat Chrome in a battery test. Yeah, in their own study. When was the last time a company paid for a study and they got a result they didn't like and they published it. Yeah, I guess you're right. Edge does stay compared to Chrome. And I always like to say that Edge is a fabulous browser to download Chrome or Firefox or even Opera. Edge is painful. But you use Edge. That's your primary browser? No. No? It's emergency use only. It's the parachute that I use when Chrome doesn't work. Okay, so you're Chrome first. Yeah. And Edge second? I'd say... What's the difference between Edge and IE? Edge is supposed to be faster. I don't even think IE ships. They just ship with Windows 10 anymore? I thought it did. I don't know if it's... I had to do Chrome, IE, Firefox, Edge. Okay. Oh, really? You go IE? Because a lot of people don't realize that the icons are similar. Yes. Edge icon versus IE icon. They think they're in Internet Explorer but it's Edge. I mean, it's... Microsoft's doing a good job of slip-streaming that. So it starts off with, do you like Microsoft Edge? Would you like to... And then the answer is yes. Would you like to taste this? Exactly. Absolutely. And I kind of go Chrome first then Firefox and Opera then at the very last resort, it is going to be Edge. But I am more and more every day... I mean, when I open Chrome, I have like eight tabs, the sites that I go to all the time. The autoload. These are my startup tabs, right? So it's kind of annoying when I want to go to one tab. And then if I have YouTube in one, I'm watching a tech video like this one here or other places. I mean, if you look at the Task Manager, they're like 500 mega-ramp and there's like 30 processes and they're huge. And then I do the same thing in Firefox and it's a fraction of it. So I literally am switching. It's kind of hard because I have Chrome, I spend a lot of time with that plug-ins and the add-ins and I know just exactly how I want and all my saved passwords are in there in Firefox. It tries to pull them out and do that. But really, it's a goal of mine by the end of the year to queen myself off of Chrome and over to Firefox. It's open source. I really like that. To have that, there are a lot more open, not from open source, but as far as plug-ins and what you're able to do. And the memory utilization is so much less. That's huge. Yeah. Chrome, I think, is still faster. When I open the same pages in Chrome, seven tabs and seven same tabs. It's probably 10%, 20% faster. I don't think real-word you'd be able to find that. But I think as Chrome, I mean, it used to be so fast. That's when I first started using it. This is Windows XP, Windows Vista days, kind of when Chrome first came out. It was just so thin. There was nothing extra. None of this bloatware added in there. It was so lightning fast. But it just happens. It just adds something out. Another feature, another feature of this rendering engine and there's this plug-in and that plug-in. And I just don't see that happening with Firefox. So I'll definitely keep you informed of how that goes. But it's tough. I mean, changing, it's like just hard. It is. You go first. It is, exactly. I absolutely do that. And another interesting thing, I don't know if you saw, but Papua New Guinea, what they want to do is they want to ban Facebook at the country level for a month. Literally, no Facebook coming in. Like checking your cell phone in at the hotel. Exactly. No Facebook in, no Facebook out. And they want to look at productivity of the country. They're so worried that Facebook is taking over the lives as a government. They want to get rid of that. And they want to see how people react. I mean, you know there's going to be some people leaving the country because they are afraid of losing Facebook. But it's just interesting how much it's taken over people's lives and they can't do anything without checking in. And Facebook isn't what it used to be. You know, kind of, like my son, he's a 14-year-old. Yeah, going to high school. He doesn't even have a Facebook account. It's all, it's Insta. And they call it Snap. I have a short name. Those are the two things that they're in. So I think it would be really interesting if they stopped all social media. You know, there is things like Twitter. Governments use that for notifications. Like, you know, I don't think why Governor David E. Gates ever lived down that he didn't know his Twitter password after the false North Street nuclear missile strike. So Twitter, those kind of things, there are definitely, that's a very quick and easy and effective way to get information out. So I don't think they should block everything. But I would, I really want to follow that and see what happens. I mean, are the people going to rebel and say, I want, you know, I want my MTV when I was growing up. Yeah, absolutely. So that will be interesting for sure. And on the techie side, so you know what a dim is. And inside your computer, you've got these little, they call them sticks and ram. They're about this tall, really narrow and about this long. I can clearly remember this was 1996, 2007, if I'm talking to someone, and I heard that Microsoft's, their big mail server had 512 megabytes of RAM. And to me, that just seemed like the most, I mean, why would you ever need more than 512 megabytes of RAM? I mean, that was, because my computer, I had maybe half a mega RAM. And Intel just released one of these dims, single memory slot, with 512 gigabytes of storage in one slot of RAM. It's just, you know, that Moore's law, that, you know, number of transistors is going to double every 18 to 24 months. It just, that's got to stop. I mean, 512 gigabytes of RAM when computers, people used to think 640 kilobytes, you know, so that's about 10, 10 times 10 and it creates a factor of 10. So it's just amazing, you know, where that's going, okay? Now, if I was to ask you, what's the third most visited? Well, let me ask you this. What's the first, the number one, the top site visited worldwide on the internet? What would your guess be? Google. So that's number two. What do you think number one is? Number one? It's owned by Google. And you watched videos there. YouTube. YouTube! Do you want, you got that, right? So that's number one and two. Number three used to be Facebook, but it just got surpassed by Reddit. And if you've been on Reddit, but it's a forum where you can discuss things and there are a lot of things called subreddits where, you know, there's probably a subreddit on our show here. I mean, we have thousands of, you know, both of our followers are in there and you and I are there. And it's a shock to me that that's number three now that such a transition from a Facebook is very media rich and all the memes and the pictures and the videos. And on Reddit, it's text-based. And I think a lot of that goes to mobile and Google kinds of devices. How are the younger people, you know, the people 25 and below, how do they consume information? We're not sitting at a computer. I mean, if I'm sitting at a chair with my computer here and my phone there, even my tablet, I'll reach for my computer. My son is not even a choice. He reaches for his phone. I mean, that's just how he's used to consuming. I remember, I've been saying that a lot today, I remember, I remember when we had, I tried to turn on my first book report, printed on a dot matrix printer. It wasn't typed. It was on a dot matrix printer. It was probably, it was a Commodore 64 printer. It was before Oki data. But in the teacher, I can't read this, you know, because it wasn't very, you know, the dots were really big. But yeah, that's just, people are just used to it. And our generation, the screen, the dual monitors, but they're just used to having that there in their hands. So I think that that's a huge thing. And I feel sorry for, you know, things real media rich kind. I mean, when my son goes to YouTube, I mean, it's very little. Everything else they get is through Snapchat or through Instagram. They're just short little 10, they don't watch a 10 minute video on something. They'll watch it, you know, somebody getting posterized in the NBA or Steph Curry doing this. There's an interesting kind of turn with how we digest information these days. I think when you look at the younger generation and how they receive information, it doesn't have to be in long segments. It can be in very, very short segments. And, you know, part of me wants to say, you can see part of it, part of that data coming through and be successful in understanding it and digesting it. And the other part of me says, you know, pick up the phone and get in front of somebody and then you'll really get the full meaning. So I think there's some advantages to it. But, you know, how people manage that influx of data. So Reddit, I find it very interesting that there's a craving for information rather than entertainment. But then you've got the YouTube at number one slot. So maybe that answers the question. There's a lot more old people than young people. But I mean, pretty few more years, the old people, the young people are going to be the old people. And you know, that's interesting what you just said because you just talked about how they consume information. Okay, school, the way they learn in school is no different than the tools they use. They have computers now instead of textbooks. But you have a 45 minute class and you have six periods a day. That's exactly like, I mean, I had computers, at Kalaheo, there are two computers for the whole school. There are Apple, two EEs down now in the library, right? But there are computers there. And how come education isn't keeping up? Why don't they give them, feed them in little bits and constantly changing and rapidly changing. And the way that they, because they can consume information at a tremendous rate. But we're forcing them to sit down at a desk, read this book, do this assignment. And when we go to the grocery store and I ask my son, okay, let's look at the Diet Coke and look at the Diet Pepsi. Which one's the better deal? The three, four, you know, $7 or buy one, get one free for $10. And he has no patience for that kind of real, real kind of amount. I think that should be one of our show segments. We should do a whole segment on education and how they use technology. I appreciate that, Matt. Thank you. We're going to cut for a short break. And when we get back, we're going to talk about routers. This crazy thing going on today, I was just walking by and all these DJs and producers are set up all around the city. I just walked by and I said, what's happening, guys? They told me they were making me... So we'll do it. All right, welcome back. We've got Matt Darnell from Comptail. My name's Greg Jackson, your host. We are going to talk about routers. And last week we spoke about ISPs. And if you visualize or you have an idea of how that works, information is coming in and out from your internet provider. And it's got to be managed by something. And today we're going to talk about how that information is managed and we're going to talk about routers. So how would you define what a router is, Matt? Yeah. So I think first if we can kind of show where someone can look at a router. So what I'll be drawing here is there's... In a small business there's two main types. What I'm going to have in this cloud is my internet provider and that's going to come into my house. Now it might be fiber, it might be it might be coax, but that's going to go into a box. And this box is owned by your provider. And what's that box called? Yeah. So depending on what it does. Is that a spell provider? I don't know. There's no spell check. That's good. That's a small O. Exactly. It's a small O provider. And provider C. And so with that this box here usually is also your router. Right. And that can be. So coming out of here, I'm going to have my devices. This might be my computer here. It might be my printer. And those type things can plug right in and have that. Sometimes my phone too, right? I got a phone at the house. Absolutely. So I can have a phone if you have a phone for those kind of things. So sometimes that router can be in there. And what that does is it lets good traffic go out and keeps the bad traffic from coming back in at a basic sense. So that's what my router is doing. What's the advantage of having a router? I mean you've got one, the information is flowing. Yeah, absolutely. So with the router, what that allows you to do is control a variety of things. The router it will allow me, so let's say like a very common application. Very few times, a lot of times the router you don't have to touch. You leave that here. But if I have a camera assistant, let's say I have a camera. And that's coming out of a camera system right there. And I'm over here in the world and I want to view it from my mobile phone. Right? How do I let my mobile phone here go through the internet into my router and over to my camera? Right? I've got to allow that to happen. I don't want anyone just to be able to come in from the internet and go through my router and I want all of this over here protected. Okay? From the outside world. So it's kind of it's a barrier between inside of my network. Trust all my equipment. I trust everything. And the big bad world. Think of it as a front door to your house. It's a barrier there. Not saying people can't break through. As you know that there's that issue we have the FBI wants everyone to re-reboot their routers just because they might have been affected. But for the normal person, it's that front door it's that barrier. I can let in who I want to let in. But it's going to keep just the average person from coming into my house. So I've worked with some businesses they've got an ISP coming in. They got the provider that you were drawing. They give it to me for free but I don't have enough ports on it. Some of the things that I talked to some of my customers about are Wi-Fi not enough ports. The term firewall comes up. How does router fit into all that? So do I just use theirs? Do I buy something? I'd say in most of the small business that we work with what they give you is not enough is not good enough for that. There's not enough ports in it for all my devices and you don't have that control that a business needs. They're really the ones that they give you for free. Again, you're getting exactly what you paid for. It's just very basic access. It's the tricycle. I don't get you there. I won't get you there very fast but it will get you there. So we generally recommend to people that you don't use what the company gives you for the router as their starter kit. And you want to buy the external router for that. You have a favorite brand? I think it's more based on what you want to do. I think brands of routers in most cases kind of like cars. Or Honda versus Toyota those types. People have a favorite. But I think functionality wise they kind of come into two different layers. So I've seen, I mean you go to Costco and they got these Netgears, these Linksys they run you around 100 bucks. Let's say you're a small business owner. What should a small business owner expect to pay for say a router? I would think the two levels for just a router that might have some Wi-Fi built into it and maybe four ports. I think between $100 and $200 is... It's a commercial grade. Well I wouldn't call it commercial grade. It's commercial but it's probably the home level version of that. And that is going to do those things. It's going to let you view your cameras from your mobile phone. It's going to keep the bad guys out. It's going to give you secure Wi-Fi. But what it's not going to do is that next level of doing things like when you are going out to the website. It's not going to look at every single website you go to. Like packet sniffing or something like that. UTM is one of those things that you could use to... That's some of the things that we've pitched to some of our customers. Yeah, so the unified threat management it can be built into the router. It can be things like your computer has antivirus and has spam built it right. But it's got to come through the router first. So the router before it even hits your computer, before your computer can even think about opening that email the firewall can stop it there. But the LinkSys or a Netgear from Costco will or will not do that? Will not do that. Yeah, so that $100 it's going to do routing it's going to do basic firewalling type of functionality. But it's not going to do that deep level looking at what it's like watching the movie versus reading the book. The book has got so much more detail and describes things a lot more. It goes by a lot. Deep packet inspection, unified threat management. It's looking at the context of what you're doing at the router. If you're trying to go to a website that's trying to give you a virus, again it doesn't get to your computer and your antivirus on your computer says whoa, you got a virus it stops that at the router. So that but now we're talking about $600 or $700 for that kind of a router. If you're a company I mean that doesn't seem like a bad investment. I mean you're willing to dump a $600 into your home. Why not $600 into your business, right? I mean you're dealing with people's financial information PCs make sense? Absolutely, and we definitely recommend that for every user and it's something we're going to talk about later as backup but it's like I read somewhere that 98% of all backup hardware software is bought after someone loses data. That's worth it. There's a value with that and that makes sense. So I think the same with the UTM so it's your blocking, it's your antivirus before that even to the point where and it's getting harder though because now a lot of people have their mail in the cloud and so it's trying to intercept those streams that are encrypted so you really want to have the next layer of security which I think is all, I mean if you're more than three or four people, especially if you're dealing with credit cards I've heard people saying that they embed malware in pictures and you download a picture and it's got bad code in it and make sure your computer do bad things. I guess the UTM would pick up something like that? Yeah, absolutely and there is an ongoing cost because as you can imagine the threats are constantly changing. Like a subscription base. So the threats are constantly changing so there's someone out in the world that just like your antivirus software you have a subscription for that because you want to keep updated with the latest viruses and the signature so you know when you have one. We're the bad websites. When you try to go to a website that's known to provide malware sometimes Chrome will tell you hey you don't want to go there based on what you're doing but before you even get that far it won't even let Chrome get there because as soon as you say I want to go there nope, I'm not going to let you go there because you have that and then with that you can have more policy based kinds of things where if you wanted to okay know YouTube from 8 to 5 except these two computers you're able to do those kind because it knows more about what you're doing rather than just letting people go there a lot smarter today. I mean even my Netgear has an app on it that I can remotely manage it I mean when you and I started working with some of the customers now we use cloud managed devices talk a little bit about that. Yeah so how you manage those can be directly onto the device you plug into it and you do a screen the kind of stuff we work with now you plug the device in it checks in with the cloud so then what you do is you program this website in the cloud down all the program. I was really happy with the performance. Yeah so as soon as so no matter where you are you're able to go to this always accessible cloud site and make a change so if we want to make a change to every one of our customers in 30 seconds we can do that. We just go there we say execute and it's going to push that out to all of the folks that we want so it's a very very easy way and it allows you know people to you're able to monitor yourself you know what's happening with those. So when you think about the small business and you think about how much a small business let's just say you have an office of you have a small business and it's got 10 to 20 people it's 6 to 700 bucks still going to cover it and then maybe you know service fee for keeping it going. Yeah I would think you'd probably want to budget maybe $1500 okay the first year you know buy the device. This is not an EYI I mean you want to get somebody you trust to install it right? I would think so. And it's people say well what's your most important asset you know it's not your people it's not your money it's your information you know I mean and what they say is oh I can always get more people I can go borrow some more money but if we lost all of our information somebody stole it or if we lost credibility like Zippy's just had a data loss where people got in somehow and took all credit card information from there so keeping those bad people out so I mean people are critical cash flow is critical but without information you know if your information is I mean from ransomware where someone gets in and they encrypt all they encrypt all of your files and you have to go through that so it's really it's almost like marketing you know people say I can't afford it but can you afford not to exactly so it's just got to be a line item security is so important in today's connected world that's also security on on because somebody think oh I've got antivirus I've got that but what happens when somebody brings their laptop from home and it's just riddled with viruses they plug it in and they start trying to attack things so it's the internal vectors the sideways vectors all these attack vectors coming at you and that that helps a lot that was really helpful I appreciate it Matt thank you thank you so I'd like to thank you for being on the show thanks for letting me be host this time pretty great job thank you for every of all our viewers thanks for joining us supporting your tech and we will see you in a couple weeks