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UK ISP Concern Spreads as More Cats Found Sitting on Broadband Routers

Monday, Mar 5th, 2012 (2:50 pm) - Score 10,277

Have you or anybody you know been affected by a cat sitting, sleeping or potentially even defecating (iew..) on your beloved broadband router? According to support staff at one ISP, Be Broadband, “feline interference” is a potentially very serious problem and one that has reportedly “bothered” their customers for “many years“.

The problem first came to light after one of Be Broadband’s customers (Liam) raised this most serious of issues with the ISPs support department. According to Liam, his “router is apparently very attractive” to cats and this results in his pet spending most of the day asleep on top of it or knocking the wireless aerial about, which takes his home network down.

Problems like this are becoming more common, as many cat owners could probably attest, but thankfully BE had a solution. The ISP promptly responded by sending Liam two decoy routers to help mitigate the effect.

BE’s Customer Support Rep said:

Basically, we are going to send you two routers, and we will ask both of them to be returned at the end. Of course we will love to keep you as a customer until the end of time, but everything is up to you.

About the decoy function, one possible solution will be… plug both and switch them on, then see which one is attracting the feline aggressor and then plug the DSL cable in the other router.

Another possible solution is to stack them so the upper router takes the aggro.

Of course the final decision should be based on the current situation.

It is not a problem if the router have cat food properties, as (as we stated in the beginning) this is ongoing issue, so we might be able to re-use the router for the same purpose.”

Thankfully the decoy router did the trick and Liam’s cat has now stopped sitting on his router, although not all ISPs would take the problem quite so seriously and as a result many people may continue to suffer from wireless connectivity and potentially even overheating problems. A suspicious looking cat is pictured below (aka – suspicious cat is suspicious).

cat sitting on be broadband router uk

ISPreview.co.uk’s own cat, Minty, whom sadly passed away recently, was known to have a fondness for one of our old LinkSys routers because it got particularly warm in winter. At this stage it’s unclear whether or not cats prefer specific models or not, although take it from us, spreading a mountain of orange peel over the device seemed only to make it more comfortable. The Daily Mail, Be Usergroup and Reddit have also picked up on this most serious of all problems.

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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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