Yes, your machine distinguishes between those cases. But ignorant users who know zero about tech and just want to watch Tiktok do not know how to distinguish those cases. They most likely do not even know they are distinguishable cases.
The old saying that “Any sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic” has an unfortunate corollary:
Once tech becomes advanced enough to be opaque to an unmotivated user, it’s simply a magical black box that either works or is broken and they have no ability to delve deeper or address problems. None.
When I worked at the UPS help desk the guy next to me got a call about nothing on the screen of the UPS-owned shipping computer. He’d been troubleshooting for about ten minutes when he heard somebody in the background, “Hey, Bob, did you find that flashlight?”
I say “ethernet cable” unless I know it’s a crossover cable. Or unless I’m looking to buy, in which case I need to specify the exact kind I want to buy.
I don’t even remember the last time I connected anything with an ethernet cable, other than a foot or two to patch my wifi router to broadband router. Can’t remember the last time I made or even saw a crossover cable.
Almost nothing has needed it for 25+ years. 1000BASE-T uses all 4 pairs in both directions. And even 100BASE-T devices usually have auto MDI-X. Or there was just an “uplink” button on the network hub.
Hehehe, I believe this is a typo of “Cue head-to-desk percussion.”
Way back when I supported cable internet access, after a hurricane hit Florida we had more than one person in Tampa calling about their service being out with the cable modem unable to get a connection to the head-end. Over the course of the call, the tech assisting them found that they were sitting in a house with 1-2 feet of water in it.
To the OP’s question: I’d call it an ethernet cable. I’m so happy I don’t have to tip them anymore, I sucked at it.
Very true. I think it’s worth pointing out that this is indicative of real abject stupidity rather than lack of knowledge about technology, and it makes life much harder for the stupid. Because the two cases represent the distinction between “there is a fault here somewhere within a few feet of me that I need to fix” versus “there is a fault somewhere many miles away that is someone else’s problem and I just need to report it and/or wait it out”.
Back in the day, traditional telcos had two magic words they used in problem situations: “customer premises”. If the fault was found to be within the telco’s network, they would fix it. If there was no fault found outside the defined boundaries, then, dear customer, it sucks to be you.
There are certainly edge case exceptions, and at one time, when Bell and the baby Bells reigned supreme, they were responsible for all of it. In return, the customer was forbidden from ever touching the sacred telephone wiring in his own house. But those days are long gone (and good riddance!).
A failure to connect to the Wi-fi LAN is surely local. Either your device or the WAP is powered off, failed, misconfigured, or out of range. At home, you control the WAP. Even if you don’t know that. Even if you don’t know what a “WAP” is. In a public place the WAP is somebody else’s problem to fix.
A valid Wi-Fi connection to the WAP that doesn’t reach the internet is a fault in the local router, its configuration, or the far end ISP connection. Again at home you control the router and may even have access to its configuration beyond just cycling power to achieve a reboot. Out in public you have no such control or access. And the rest of the infrastructure in e.g. a hotel is vastly more complicated than just WAP → WAN → internet. Lots of intermediate local wiring plant and router structures. None of which you can see or influence.
When all of that is a black box the user is helpless even if the problem is as simple as the cat jostled the power cord under their desk. You and I at least have a mental block diagram that allows us to do the taxonomy I just did. They don’t. Being stupid doesn’t help, but being ignorant is just as debilitating.
I’ll note that in modern home installations involving fiber there’s another layer. The WAN side of the WAP/router connects via RJ45 cable and / or cabling in your walls to another box, the Optical Network Terminal = ONT. That box in turn connects via optical fiber to the gizmos upstream in a utility cabinet down the street or across the other side of your building and beyond your control. The ONT also requires electricity and may well be on a different power circuit from your WAP/router.
I had a case like that a few years ago, shortly after my building cut over from coax to fiber. My WAP/router in my office was alive and well and blinking sorta happily. But no internet. Cue bafflement.
I went out to the kitchen to get a water while I thought about it. That’s when I noticed the power was out in my kitchen. Where the wiring cabinet terminates and the shiny new ONT lived. A HA! Reset the CB for my kitchen, await the ONT rebooting & reconnecting, reset all the downstream stuff in the correct sequence and all is well.
A LOT of background knowledge was needed to save that day. Knowledge happily lacking in vast swathes of the populace.
That, or they were so frustrated they were banging dead dogs on the desk. They used to use horses, but they had to stop.
Or, if you’re Cox Cable, you just always assume it’s on the customer premises, even if there’s a line dangling from the pole outside, or if it’s the defective box that you force the customer to buy and use.
But “The wifi is out” isn’t always a problem at the customer’s end. During covid, there was a big push to make Internet available to everyone, and sometimes, that was accomplished by various services installing WiFi access points in public locations (on a utility pole, say) close to customers’ houses (similar to how 5G works). So the customer’s internet connection was absolutely via WiFi, and the WiFi was absolutely provided by their ISP.
Yeah, in one case, after driving to the site, it turned out the power was out for the whole building; for some reason, none of this seemed important enough to mention when calling me out because ‘the internet is down’.
This is an incredibly arrogant attitude. And I say this as someone who always tries to figure out what’s wrong with anything in my house before bringing in someone else, whether it’s electrical, HVAC, plumbing, Wifi, etc. There’s simply too much information about modern technology to expect everyone to be able to be their own Level 1 customer support, and calling people who don’t do that “stupid” is frankly offensive.
Good grief, man, you’re reading far too much into what was really a pretty simple statement. In a home networking environment, it usually – usually! – shouldn’t be particularly difficult to determine if a fault is within your own premises and is something you can fix, or whether it’s something remote like a problem with the ISP or the broader internet.
Of course, occasionally it may not be obvious and the symptoms may even be misleading. A few months ago my internet speed was much slower than usual, which would typically indicate an issue with the broadband ISP or possibly the cable modem. I was really surprised that it turned out to be a loose Ethernet cable, which somehow provided a signal adequate for 100 Mbps Ethernet but not for 1000 Mbps. The fix was as easy as unplugging and re-plugging it.
I didn’t do IT support but I did support manufacturing assembly and test equipment as part of my job. One tech was very needy and I had to help him more than the others. One day I was in the clean room and I told him and others that I was very busy today so please don’t bug me unless it’s super critical. Like fifteen minutes later he called me to the test area and I was more than a little annoyed. I was like, “Mark, this better be fucking important”. He pointed to one of the machines and there was smoke pouring out of it! The UPS had literally caught fire. I had to laugh at myself because it was indeed a true emergency. All I had to do was unplug it but he was definitely within his rights to interrupt me and he rightfully never let me forget it.