More stupid design

Regular readers may recall that a few years ago I posted about an example of stupid design, whereby the use of an unsuitable connector would cause the power supply of an audio component to let out all its magic smoke if the DC power connector was unplugged when powered. Well, not to be outdone, another bit of stupidity from the past just reared its head.

Dear readers, I present to you - the Thomson Speedtouch DSL router.

Ok, I hear you ask, what's the stupidity? Well... a router is considered to be a piece of infrastructure, correct?

And as such, needs to come back up to a working condition when power is restored after an outage, correct?

So, the small round bump on the front panel of this thing (see the photo) is actually the power switch. A software power switch. A software power switch that defaults to standby when power is restored.

To appreciate the idiocy of this, imagine you're in a rural area. You've placed the router in the best possible location for the Wi-Fi signal. Which just happens to be somewhere that requires a stepladder to access.

Being in a rural area, the power is subject to "brown-outs". Which are often serious enough to cause the router to reset.

Now, because of the monumental idiocy in making the power software-controlled, and defaulting to "off", every time there is a brownout you have to fetch the stepladder to press the power button to turn the damned thing back on.

Or worse, you're a small business, the router is located in a locked cupboard or office, and the person with the key is on holiday. (Yes I know, but it does happen.) You're basically screwed until you can gain physical access to the router to power it back on.

Worse still, because these routers also contained a 4-port switch, not only would you lose internet access until the router was powered back on, you'd also lose your wired and wireless network connectivity. So your PC can't see the server, or the printer, or basically anything. Until someone pushes the button on the front to turn the power back on.

I was reminded of this as last week I pulled one of these old routers from a client's site as they were upgrading to fibre broadband and needed a replacement. Fortunately the new router has a mechanical power switch on the rear of the unit where it can't be accidentally pressed.

What on earth were Thomson / Alcatel thinking when they came up with this brain-dead idea for the Speedtouch range?