Comment by fuzzfactor

>Those systems are not cheap.

That's part of the problem. By the time the fully analog original equipment needed replacement, the only commercial replacements available already had been built for network access for quite a number of years while none of the purchasing people were keeping up-to-date with it.

Even the less-massive models are so expensive that the vendors can't fail to include the latest technology whether anybody is using it yet or not, because future. These things don't fly off the shelf very often either and lots of analog leaders "just" used temporary consultants to bolt on some networking without ever gaining any unwanted digital headaches and accompanying expertise.

Along with the routers of the 1990's, inexperienced users were supposed to be able to just connect it and have it work.

Lots of them never connected it to the web or any other network, or maybe years later when there should have been orders of magnitude more security considerations they finally plugged in a long enough ethernet cable and it just worked as they always expected it to once the future got here.

It hasn't been that many decades, conventional (lack of) wisdom is it certainly shouldn't take more effort to install than an analog unit would have required.

That was expensive enough.