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WiFi Woes - What kit do I actually NEED?


Please DON’T waste money changing Wi-Fi, changing ISP, buying IT cables or kit!!! Please talk to us first!


Following several callouts this week I thought I would once again recommend that anyone who has an Internet or other IT-based problem please contact us before you spend any money. This week I have had three customers who have spent hundreds of NZD buying things that don’t really work well.


This week I have had several callouts where customers have bought Wi-Fi extenders or new routers that just haven’t worked well for them. In each case they have spent hundreds of NZD and hours of their time trying to get the things to work, all to no avail. It could be that they’ve purchased a Wi-Fi extender that uses radio waves to connect, but something is in the way, or a wired extender that transfers data through the Earth line of the power system, but it turns out that the solution is far too slow due to multiple joins or distance.


One customer this week paid $250.00 for an extender which failed to work then rang us. We were there for at least an hour testing various things with the kit they had purchased, so we added our time to the cost of the kit, only to find that it just wasn’t the right kit for their requirements. They now have to buy a new piece of kit, pay us, and probably pay us to install the new solution. Whilst there we also discovered that their router/modem was very old and provided slow Wi-Fi, so it needed upgrading. Testing and talking to Spark took another hour. If we had been contacted first then I could have brought a system from our stock to test their issues and it would have been resolved in under an hour with one purchase for new hardware fixing everything they needed. Now I have to go back there with the test equipment and see which solution works best and then recommend that solution, so 3 visits in total and two purchased solutions.



We have a selection of items in store that we can bring to your site and test before you buy, this way you only pay once and you don’t pay for someone to try and force the wrong items to work.


Other customers have paid us for several hours of work to cobble together various bits and pieces of kit that they have lying around which are invariably old and heading towards Redundancy. Doing this can take several hours of effort, one took 4 hours as we unraveled bits of old kit, and configured things to work together. By the time we had something working they could have purchased an up-to-date solution, had us configure and install it, and be future-proof for a number of years all for the same price.


Don’t get me wrong, we love it when we spend hours teasing bits of old kit together as we get paid by the hour whilst we make little to nothing on hardware, so these projects pay us a fair whack of profit. By doing it the way we suggest in this article, by getting us in for half an hour to test some kit we have on your site and recommending what you should purchase, results in our getting paid a whole lot less as new kit we recommend can be installed very quickly so you’re paying much less for our time and overall paying less in total and getting a new solution. When you go to PB Tech or other outlets they make money on selling you kit (we don’t) and often they will push what they are targeted to sell, rather than what will work in your environment.


So when you have a problem or need to make a change to your IT environment please speak to us first as a half-hour call-out to test a couple of solutions for your site is cheaper by far than your buying the wrong equipment, paying us to, hopefully, wedge it in to work and then having to pay more to buy the correct solution when the first indeed fails.

We are called Islandtech for a reason, we publish regular articles for a reason; we want to support our community fairly, but we can only help you if you help yourselves; speak to us first.


We can be reached on Support: support@islandtech.nz


Call: 09 870 5698 28 Belgium St Above Rendevous/Waiheke Specialty food cafe





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