My mother recently gifted me a Roomba. It was one part passive aggression (there is a lot of dog hair on my floors), one part a scientific experiment. I was trialing the Roomba for my mother, who wanted to know if it would be worth the money for her.

I would not have bought this for myself. Call me a Luddite, but I don’t like my vacuum cleaner being connected to my WiFi. It feels unnecessary. I don’t know that I want the app developers to know how shamelessly infrequently I vacuum, or how shamefully frequently I need to. But the Roomba worked well enough at finding and capturing all the dog hair, and I told my mom so.

Satisfied with this answer, my mom also purchased a Roomba. She called me up in frustration, saying that the Roomba wouldn’t work.

“OK,” I said. “What’s not working?”

“It won’t connect to the WiFi,” she said. “How did you get yours to work?”

“I just followed the instructions that came with the packaging. There should be a little card somewhere,” I said.

“Right,” she replied. “That didn’t work.”

Knowing the WiFi in my parent’s house is, to be blunt, bad, I asked my mom if the WiFi was working well on other devices. She answered, “Yes.”

“Out of curiosity,” I asked, “What kind of WiFi does your router use?”

Clearly exasperated that I was even asking this question, since we’ve never thrown anything away that wasn’t literally useless, my mom answered, “It’s the same modem we’ve been using for 10 years. It works fine.”

A fun fact about me is that I worked in broadband telecommunications for three years. So I am weirdly, specifically, familiar with DOCSIS 3.0 and 3.1. I also have half of an IT cert. (I took some community college classes and determined that it was probably unnecessary for me to take the certification exam, since certs expire after three years, I was already employed as a technical writer, and I didn’t want a help desk job. Joke’s on me, as I’m somehow the entire help desk team at My Mom’s House INC.)

I politely asked my mom, “Have you considered updating your modem?”

“No,” she said. “Why?”

So I went and googled for a nice refurbished 3.1 modem with WiFi 6 support that was still less expensive than a year of equipment rentals from her ISP. She ran to our neighborhood’s least decrepit Best Buy to pick it up, and, one quick call to her ISP later, she was in business and complaining to me that the Roomba kept falling down the basement stairs.

And me? Well what I got was priceless. The knowledge that three years of working in broadband telecommunications qualified me to tell my mom to stop using an outdated modem and be mildly vindicated when it worked.

(Similarly, I recently heckled my ISP for a new modem until they finally gave me one. My last update eliminated my jitter issues in video calls, and I paid less over the past year than what a shiny new modem/router combo would have cost. So my old job is still paying dividends and, just like dividends, it effectively makes me about $3.50.)

If your modem is as old as my mom’s, I would highly recommend considering a new (or newer) modem if you want to keep up, especially considering the first DOCSIS 4.0 plans are finally on the horizon. Your 3.0 modem is going the way of the dinosaurs, and I will go the way of Jeff Goldblum and say that yes, maybe your modem still works. But still: