Mark's Thoughts

Which Mr M Wilson?

markw@markwilson.co.uk (Mark Wilson) — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Which Mr M Wilson?

Why is Barclaycard sending me a PIN for a credit card I don’t recognise?

That was the slightly alarming question I found myself asking recently.

The envelope was addressed to “Mr M Wilson” at my home address. That’s me, so I opened it. Inside was correspondence about a PIN for a credit card. I do have a Barclaycard, but I don’t often use it.

After attempting to use this information to change the PIN on my card, and then spending rather more time than I would have liked navigating Barclaycard’s automated telephone system, I eventually worked out what had happened.

The letter wasn’t for me at all. It was for my son.

Similar, but not identical, names

I’m Mark. And one of my adult sons, Matthew, lives at the same address. So we’re both Mr M Wilson.

We both have middle names too, so even using our full initials would distinguish between us.

Yet Barclaycard, along with several other organisations, insists on addressing correspondence using only our title, first initial and surname. Often, inside the envelope, they write something like “Dear Mark” — although not in this case.

Most of the time, that’s just an irritation. One of us opens a letter, starts reading and realises that it belongs to the other. This time, seeing something financial that I didn’t recognise was enough to make me wonder whether there was a problem with an account in my name.

All because the envelope didn’t contain enough information to tell two people at the same address apart.

Why just an initial?

Perhaps it’s about privacy. An initial reveals less than a full first name, so at first glance that might seem consistent with the principle of data minimisation.

But data minimisation doesn’t simply mean using as little information as possible.

The Information Commissioner’s Office says personal data should be “adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary”. It describes adequate as having enough information to properly fulfil the intended purpose.

The ICO’s guidance on identifiers also notes that, where a name isn’t enough to distinguish between two people, further details may be needed.

The purpose of putting a name on an envelope is surely to identify the intended recipient. At our address, Mr M Wilson doesn’t do that.

And Barclaycard has the information it needs. Emails address me as “Hello Mark”. Somewhere between my customer record and the envelope, Mark becomes M.

Printing “Mark” or “Matthew” instead of “M” would reveal a few additional letters about us to somebody looking at our mail. But not printing them resulted in me opening correspondence about my son’s credit card.

If privacy is the reason for using an initial, that seems a curious outcome.

I tried to ask

Rather than speculate about why Barclaycard addresses its correspondence this way, I thought I’d ask.

After my earlier experience with the telephone system, I tried the messaging service in the Barclaycard app.

Unfortunately, having invited me to “Send us a message”, the app told me that messaging was unavailable and suggested I call instead. You couldn’t make it up…

So I still don’t know why Barclaycard uses only an initial. And, to be fair, it’s not the only organisation that does.

There’s nothing particularly unusual about two adults with the same surname and first initial living at the same address. Nor am I suggesting that putting Mr M Wilson on an envelope is a breach of data protection law.

Most of the time, the only consequence is that one of us opens the other’s post. Occasionally, though, it’s a worrying time wondering why you have been issued a PIN for a credit card you don’t recognise.

I’d happily trade a few more letters on the outside of the envelope to avoid finding out what’s on the inside of someone else’s.

The unintended consequences of good security

markw@markwilson.co.uk (Mark Wilson) — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The unintended consequences of good security

My bag felt light yesterday morning. I didn’t think much of it until I got to the station and realised why: my laptop was still at home.

For a moment, I considered going back. Twenty minutes home, a couple of minutes to grab it, then perhaps another thirty to get back to the station. I’d lose an hour, possibly my parking space and maybe another train. Everything would be getting tight for my first meeting.

So I decided to chance it.

Maybe I don’t need a laptop

Actually, most of my day would be fine. I had my work phone for a Teams call and could take notes on that too. The RFP response I needed to review would have to wait until I got home, and I’d need to work into the evening, but that wasn’t the end of the world. In some ways, it was a nice demonstration of how much less dependent we’ve become on a particular device.

Then I remembered the presentation.

The deck was in OneDrive and I’d sent a link to my team the day before. I could open it on my work phone, but that wasn’t much use for presenting to a room — I couldn’t access my notes at the same time. I had my personal iPhone and iPad with me, though. Surely I could just open the presentation in a browser on one of those?

No. And, to be fair, that’s exactly what our information protection controls are there to prevent. The presentation was classified Internal and my personal devices are unmanaged. I wasn’t trying to download it or keep a copy; I just wanted to open it in a browser long enough to put it on a meeting-room screen.

There must be another way

So I did what people do when technology gets in the way: I started looking for an alternative approach. At that moment I wasn’t thinking like a technology leader, considering information classification, device management and acceptable risk. I was just a user, trying to get stuff done.

Could I get the link onto another device? Could I open it differently? Could I ask a colleague to present it for me? Eventually, I presented from a colleague’s laptop. Problem solved, and without moving the information somewhere it shouldn’t be.

But it left me thinking about the friction we introduce in the name of security. We might understand all the individual layers and controls we’ve put in place, but our users don’t experience them individually. They experience the cumulative friction when something they need to do doesn’t work.

And their need to get stuff done doesn’t disappear.

Friction changes behaviour

That’s the bit I think we sometimes miss. When we introduce a security control, we quite rightly think about the behaviour we want to prevent. I would argue that we should spend some time thinking about the behaviour the control might create too.

I needed to present that deck, so when one route was closed I looked for another. I found an approved route, but make legitimate work difficult enough and people will inevitably find other ways to get it done. That’s not necessarily because they’re malicious or careless. Sometimes they’re just users with a meeting starting in ten minutes.

That makes security friction more than a user-experience problem. A control can reduce one risk while inadvertently encouraging behaviours that create another.

I’ve seen this before. One organisation I worked for introduced a multilayered information classification scheme intended to help people protect information appropriately. The choices were complicated enough that some users responded by marking almost everything as unclassified. A policy designed to improve information protection had inadvertently encouraged people to do the opposite. Not because they didn’t care about security, but because the secure way of working had become too difficult.

There isn’t an easy answer to this. Removing the controls isn’t it, but neither is assuming that tighter controls are always better controls.

Somewhere between information protection and getting the job done is a judgement about acceptable risk. When we’re making that judgement, we need to consider not only what a control prevents, but what it encourages people to do instead.

13 Minutes…

markw@markwilson.co.uk (Mark Wilson) — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0100

13 Minutes…

In 2018, I fulfilled a lifelong dream.

On a family holiday to Florida and Maryland, we spent a day at the Kennedy Space Center. I stood underneath a Saturn V, saw the Space Shuttle Atlantis and got to see artefacts from the history of American space exploration. These were the very same things that I’d read about as a child and dreamed of seeing for almost forty years.

I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, when space travel still seemed to be part of the future. I wasn’t a space geek, but the books in the school library certainly left an impression. Apollo missions, enormous rockets, astronauts walking on the Moon and visions of people living on space stations – or even on the Moon itself. The year 2000 was the future then, and it was all incredibly exciting.

Then came the Space Shuttle.

For my generation, the Shuttle was the spacecraft. It looked more like an aeroplane than a rocket and seemed to promise that travelling into space might one day become almost routine. Of course, we know it didn’t quite work out that way.

Recently, I’ve been revisiting some of that history through the BBC World Service podcast 13 Minutes to the Moon.

The first series tells the story behind the final 13 minutes of the Apollo 11 descent. I loved the drama of it. We all know how the story ends, but the storytelling puts you right back into those moments – the alarms, the decisions and the dwindling fuel supply. I couldn’t wait for the next episode to be released.

Series two does something similar with Apollo 13, another story where knowing the outcome does nothing to diminish the tension.

Somehow, series three passed me by completely. So, when I recently noticed that it had appeared in my podcast feed, I was delighted to discover there was more 13 Minutes… waiting for me. This time the subject was the Space Shuttle. It’s a different kind of story, covering an entire programme rather than a single mission, but I found it fascinating and binge-listened to the whole series.

And now I’m catching up with series four.

This one is different again. Rather than looking back and retelling a story, it follows Artemis II day-by-day – the April 2026 mission that took humans around the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972.

Perhaps we didn’t end up living in space as I imagined we might when I was a child. But, more than 50 years after Apollo, humans are travelling beyond low Earth orbit and around the Moon again.

And 13 Minutes… has taken me right back to those books in the school library.

If any of that captures your imagination too, it’s well worth starting at the beginning.

Listen to 13 Minutes to the Moon on BBC Sounds.

Bring your own network

markw@markwilson.co.uk (Mark Wilson) — Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Bring your own network

Most of us have heard of bring your own device. We expect our laptops, phones and tablets to work wherever we are.

But what if, instead of trusting somebody else’s network, you could simply take your own with you? That was the idea behind one of my more recent impulse purchases: the UniFi Travel Router (UTR).

It doesn’t look particularly special. It’s a small white box that slips easily into a laptop bag. It isn’t even self-powered, so you’ll need a USB-C cable and a power source. That feels like an odd omission for something designed for travel.

After using it on a few trips, though, I realised it wasn’t really a travel router. It was a way to carry my home network with me—making public Wi-Fi safer, simpler and, in some cases, almost invisible.

It’s now one of the gadgets that lives permanently in my laptop bag.

The problem with public Wi-Fi

Whether you’re in a hotel, airport lounge, coffee shop, conference venue or on a train, public Wi-Fi is often the easiest way to get online.

Modern websites encrypt almost everything using HTTPS, so this isn’t as risky as it once was. Even so, you’re still placing your trust in someone else’s network. You don’t know how it has been configured, who else is connected, or whether there’s a convincing rogue hotspot using a similar name.

I’d rather not have to think about any of that. Instead, I’d rather treat every unfamiliar network as simply a way of reaching one that I already trust.

One network, everywhere

Here’s how it works:

Instead of connecting each of your devices directly to the local Wi-Fi, you connect the travel router.
Using the UniFi app on your phone, you tell the travel router which local Wi-Fi network to join. If there’s a captive portal, such as the familiar hotel “accept our terms” page, you complete that authentication once from your phone.
The router then establishes a secure UniFi Teleport VPN connection back to your home network. From that point on, every device connected to the router behaves as though it’s sitting in your house.

Your traffic is encrypted between the travel router and your home, so, in effect, you’ve taken your home network with you.

Many guest Wi-Fi networks require you to authenticate each device individually through a captive portal. Some even limit the number of devices you can connect.

With the travel router, I authenticate once using my phone. After that, every other device simply connects to my own Wi-Fi network, exactly as it does at home.

My laptop, phone and tablet don’t know they’re connected to a guest network. As far as they’re concerned, they’re connected to the same network they always use.

To the venue, it looks like a single connected device. Behind the travel router, I can connect as many of my own devices as I like.

More than just security

I bought the travel router because I liked the idea of taking a trusted network with me. And, if I’m honest, because I’m a bit of a geek.

In practice, convenience has become the bigger benefit.

Everything behaves exactly as it does at home. My devices reconnect automatically, local services continue to work, and I don’t spend the first ten minutes in every hotel room joining Wi-Fi networks and accepting terms and conditions.

Websites should also see my home IP address rather than the IP address of the network I’m connected to. Although I haven’t travelled abroad with the UTR yet to test this, services that are normally only available in the UK should continue to work without needing a separate VPN subscription.

I’m simply using my own internet connection, wherever I happen to be.

It’s not perfect

The lack of an internal battery means you need to remember a USB-C power source. In practice, I’ve just plugged mine into the same charger that powers my phone overnight, but it would have been nice to have an hour or two of battery life for situations like trains or airport lounges.

It also assumes you already have a UniFi gateway at home capable of running Teleport. I do, but if you don’t, this probably isn’t the travel router for you.

Bringing your own network

I’ve written before that the best technology quietly disappears into the background.

The UniFi Travel Router does exactly that.

Every time I travel, it removes a little friction. I authenticate to guest Wi-Fi once, my devices reconnect automatically, and I know my traffic is heading back through a network that I already know and trust.

I can’t see myself travelling without it now.

Powerless: the invisible foundations of modern life

markw@markwilson.co.uk (Mark Wilson) — Tue, 4 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Powerless: the invisible foundations of modern life

As I write this, the electricity supply to my home is switched off.

Every few seconds, the house alarm lets out an apologetic beep. The electrician is outside, upgrading the communications module on my smart meter and installing an EV charging point. To do that, the house has to be without power for about 45 minutes.

It shouldn’t make much difference. But I feel strangely trapped.

I can’t head to a café because the electrician still needs access to the house. I can’t even take the dog for a walk in case I’m needed at home. So I stay put, waiting for the power to come back.

Disconnected

It’s surprising how quickly a home office stops being an office.

I work from home most of the time, and I’ve invested a fair amount of effort into making that work well. Reliable broadband. A solid UniFi network. A NAS. Multiple screens. Everything quietly doing its job in the background. Until someone turns the electricity off.

The Wi-Fi disappears. My NAS is unreachable. Home Assistant stops assisting. Even making a cup of coffee is off the table.

My laptop still has plenty of charge, and I can tether to my phone over 5G if I need to access the Internet. I haven’t lost the ability to work. I’ve lost the environment that makes it effortless.

Without really noticing, my mindset changes. Can I complete this task? Should I join this Teams call now or wait? And, because my mind works as it does, it’s just really hard to focus.

For just 45 minutes, my focus shifts from getting work done to managing the interruption.

Invisible foundations

The electrician isn’t here because anything has gone wrong. Quite the opposite. He’s making the house more connected. A smarter smart meter. An EV charger in preparation for when my new car arrives. More technology woven into everyday life. To get there, though, everything has to stop for a while.

It makes me wonder how much of modern life depends on things we rarely think about. Electricity is the obvious one, but it’s only part of the picture. Broadband. Mobile networks. DNS. Cloud services. The infrastructure that quietly fades into the background because it simply works.

Until it doesn’t.

Normal service resumes

Forty-five minutes without electricity isn’t a hardship. It’s barely an inconvenience.

Eventually the power comes back. The Wi-Fi reconnects. Teams signs me back in. The day carries on as though nothing had happened, and I can finally make some lunch.

The feeling of being trapped disappears almost as quickly as it arrived.

By tomorrow, I’ll have forgotten all about it.

Process debt: the hidden challenge in digital transformation

markw@markwilson.co.uk (Mark Wilson) — Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Process debt: the hidden challenge in digital transformation

A different kind of check-in

A few weeks ago, I stayed at a large hotel that’s part of a well-known international chain.

Before I arrived, I’d been encouraged to check in using the hotel’s app. That’s fairly common these days, so I didn’t think much of it. I assumed it would save me a minute or two before I collected a key card from reception.

Instead, as soon as my room was ready, the app assigned it to me and activated a digital key on my phone. While a colleague queued at reception to collect a key card, I went straight to my room, held my phone against the lock and let myself in.

Checking out the following morning was equally straightforward. A couple of taps in the app, my invoice arrived by email and I was on my way.

It wasn’t until later that I realised why the experience had stood out. The hotel hadn’t invented any new technology. Smartphones have supported NFC for years, and electronic locks are hardly revolutionary. What had changed was the process.

Someone had looked at the traditional hotel check-in experience and asked a simple question: why does every guest need to visit reception?

Process debt

In technology, we spend a lot of time talking about technical debt. I wonder whether organisations also accumulate something I’d call process debt.

Processes are usually introduced for good reasons, but they’re rarely revisited. Over time, they become accepted as “the way we do things”. Instead of questioning them, we build systems around them, automate them and eventually forget why they existed in the first place.

Once you start looking for it, you see it everywhere: a chatbot that eventually tells you to call the contact centre, an online form that still results in someone re-keying the information into another system, or a polished mobile app that’s really just a more modern front end for an old process. Technology has improved the experience around the edges, but the underlying process remains unchanged. The technology looks modern, but the thinking behind it hasn’t changed.

Start with the outcome

Good digital transformation starts by asking what you’re trying to achieve, not how technology can improve the current process.

Too often, organisations start with the process they’ve always had and look for ways to make it faster, cheaper or more efficient. They don’t go far enough because they never stop to ask whether the process is still the best way of achieving the outcome.

That’s what the hotel had done. It hadn’t asked, “How can we make check-in more efficient?” It had asked, “What does a good arrival experience look like?” Once you ask that question, the reception desk becomes optional rather than inevitable.

Looking beyond technology

That’s why I think we should spend as much time thinking about process debt as we do technical debt. Sometimes the right answer is to automate a process, sometimes it’s to simplify it and sometimes it’s to remove it altogether.

Good digital transformation doesn’t start with the process. It starts by asking what success looks like. Once you’ve answered that question, you can decide whether the process should be improved, simplified or removed altogether.

CTO Corner (August 2026): Why flexibility has become a technology strategy

markw@markwilson.co.uk (Mark Wilson) — Sat, 1 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0100

CTO Corner (August 2026): Why flexibility has become a technology strategy

If you spend enough time talking to technology leaders, a pattern begins to emerge. The conversation is becoming less about technology itself and more about the choices it enables

A few years ago, many organisations were focused on cloud migration. Today, the discussion is broader. The questions I hear are about cost, resilience, security, AI readiness and how quickly the business can respond when priorities change.

Complexity isn’t always the enemy

The traditional response to complexity has been to reduce it.

Consolidate, standardise and move towards a smaller number of strategic platforms. And there are still good reasons for doing that: simplicity has real value. The difference today is that most organisations are balancing a much broader range of requirements, which means the answer is not always to force everything into the same environment.

Different workloads have different needs. Some benefit from the scale and pace of hyperscale cloud platforms. Others demand predictable performance, specific compliance controls or closer integration with legacy systems. New acquisitions bring additional complexity. Regulatory requirements evolve. Business priorities change.

As a result, many organisations now operate across a broader mix of platforms and environments than they did a decade ago.

Creating platforms that provide options

The organisations making the most progress aren’t trying to make every workload fit the same model. Instead, they are creating platforms that give them options.

They are building environments that allow them to take advantage of public cloud services where they deliver value, make use of private or sovereign infrastructure where greater control is needed, and combine those capabilities with managed services that reduce operational burden.

AI makes the need for adaptability clear

AI is a good example, because many organisations are trying to understand how AI can deliver value, but success depends on much more than a model or a tool. It relies on trusted data, secure access, effective governance and infrastructure that can support changing demands. Very quickly, the conversation becomes one of integration and adaptability rather than individual technologies.

Whether the goal is modernising business applications, strengthening cyber resilience or improving customer experience, organisations are looking for technology foundations that can support change over time.

Technology should give the business options

Technology should give the business options. It should make it easier to respond to opportunities, adapt when priorities change and make decisions based on current business needs rather than past technology choices.

Perhaps that’s the real measure of maturity. Not building a technology estate around a particular platform but creating the freedom to make the right decisions as circumstances change.

In my experience, the organisations that do this well find it easier to adapt as their business evolves.

This post originally appeared in a Node4 Customer Newsletter.

LinkedIn is a network, not an audience

markw@markwilson.co.uk (Mark Wilson) — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0100

LinkedIn is a network, not an audience

I’ve been on LinkedIn for almost twenty years. I was one of the first million users in the UK.

When I joined, it wasn’t a social media platform. It was a professional networking site where you kept in touch with colleagues, customers and people you’d met at conferences. If you changed jobs, LinkedIn helped you stay connected.

Since then, LinkedIn has changed enormously. Today it’s full of creators, influencers, newsletters, videos and people who’ve built businesses around their LinkedIn presence.

Which makes me wonder if I’m the one who’s got it wrong.

When LinkedIn was just LinkedIn

A few months ago, someone I know in the AI community suggested I was missing a trick.

She pointed out that I don’t accept every connection request. If I did, my posts would reach far more people. And she’s right. If my goal was to maximise the reach of my posts, then accepting every invitation would almost certainly help.

It made me realise that we were using LinkedIn for completely different things. She sees it as a platform for building an audience. I still think of it as somewhere to stay in touch with people I know and trust.

A connection isn’t a relationship

As I write this, I have 169 unanswered connection requests sitting in my LinkedIn inbox.

All are from people I don’t recognise. Some are clearly hoping to sell me something. Others may have mutual connections, but no explanation of who they are or why they’d like to connect. Most contain no message at all.

I sort of understand the lack of a message because I don’t subscribe to LinkedIn Premium, so I’m limited in the number of personalised invitations I can send each month. That isn’t really a problem because, most of the time, we’ve already had the conversation.

If I’ve met someone at a conference, after a presentation or during a customer meeting, I’ll usually mention that I’ll connect with them on LinkedIn. Sometimes we’ll do it there and then. Sometimes I’ll send the invitation later that day. Either way, it’s simply a continuation of a conversation we’ve already had.

That’s why so many unsolicited connection requests feel odd to me.

Imagine receiving an email that simply said:

Hello.

Will you reply?

No introduction. No context. No explanation of why the sender had contacted you. You’d probably ignore it. So why is that considered acceptable on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn makes it easy to collect connections. That’s not the same as building a network.

The coffee test

For many years, I was very active on Twitter. Like many people, I shared all sorts of things: technology, photography, family life, holidays and the occasional random observation. It was social media in the broadest sense.

LinkedIn was different. It was where I connected with colleagues, customers and people I’d met at events.

Over the last few years, those worlds have started to overlap. As Twitter became X and declined, many people moved to LinkedIn and brought their posting habits with them. The platform changed, and perhaps the expectations changed too.

These days, I have a simple test before I post something on LinkedIn. Is it something I’d naturally talk about over coffee with a business contact?

Sometimes that’s a technology observation. Sometimes it’s a conference I’ve attended, or an article I’ve written. Occasionally it’s something more personal, because working relationships are built between people, not job titles.

But there are plenty of things that don’t pass that test. Years ago, I’d happily have shared photos of my sons’ sporting achievements on social media. Today, I wouldn’t normally post those on LinkedIn (though there may be some exceptions as they take their steps into the world of work). Not because I’m trying to keep my personal life secret, but because they belong somewhere else.

It’s entirely possible that I’m using LinkedIn as it was, rather than as it is.

My role certainly involves sharing ideas. I write articles, speak at events, represent Node4 and help organisations make sense of technology. LinkedIn is an important part of that.

But I don’t think those conversations are valuable just because they reach more people. They’re valuable because they’re built on relationships. The network comes first.

Perhaps one day I’ll decide I’ve been looking at LinkedIn the wrong way all along. Perhaps the platform has changed and I haven’t changed with it.

But I’m OK with that.

I’d still rather have a network than an audience.

You can't beat a cable

markw@markwilson.co.uk (Mark Wilson) — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0100

For years, I had one simple rule for my home network: keep it simple.

As our family’s dependence on reliable internet grew – for working from home, streaming TV, online gaming and, back then, homework – I deliberately removed complexity wherever I could. The old home servers disappeared. Exchange Server gave way to Microsoft 365. Files moved to OneDrive, with a Synology NAS providing local storage for anything that didn’t belong in the cloud. More recently, after a bout of Azure bill shock, that was joined by a second, smaller NAS in a separate building to provide an additional backup.

There are still pockets of complexity. Home Assistant runs much of our smart home, for example (and the Zigbee pains are a whole seprate topic). But I’ve always tried to keep the underlying infrastructure as simple and as reliable as possible.

Keeping it simple

Back in 2018, after converting our loft and spreading the house across three floors, I invested in an AmpliFi HD mesh Wi-Fi system. If you don’t know AmpliFi, it’s Ubiquiti’s consumer networking range. Most IT professionals will probably be more familiar with UniFi, which targets business users.

The AmpliFi system was excellent. It covered the house well and, when something did occasionally go wrong, everyone in the family knew the fix: unplug the nearest mesh point, plug it back in, and carry on. It wasn’t glamorous, but it worked.

Then one of the mesh points failed.

At that point I decided it wasn’t worth replacing a five-year-old Wi-Fi 5 system. Instead, I’d “upgrade” to UniFi. Looking back, that’s where the problems began.

The upgrade that wasn’t

Before anyone thinks this is a rant about UniFi, it isn’t. I like the platform a lot. It gives me enterprise-grade networking features at home for a relatively modest cost. The mistake wasn’t buying UniFi. The mistake was buying it before fixing the foundations.

I started with a handful of UniFi Express (UX) devices. They looked perfect: compact, unobtrusive and, perhaps most importantly, aesthetically acceptable around the house. They could connect over Ethernet where it was available or create a wireless mesh where it wasn’t.

Unfortunately, I ignored one piece of advice that seemed to appear in almost every online discussion: don’t use a UniFi Express as your main router if you have a busy network.

Combined with a patchwork of wireless meshing and Powerline Ethernet adapters, the result was… disappointing.

The network became slower, less reliable and generally more frustrating than the AmpliFi system it had replaced. Even today, my sons still remind me, “You should have kept the AmpliFi, Dad”.

They weren’t entirely wrong.

Chasing the wrong problem

Over the following months I upgraded the network piece by piece. One of the UniFi Express units eventually failed, which gave me the excuse to replace it with a UniFi Cloud Gateway Ultra (UCG Ultra). That not only removed the limit on managed devices but also provided a significantly more capable router. My ISP’s router remains in place purely to terminate the broadband connection, with the UniFi Cloud Gateway handling the routing.

Migrating the configuration mostly went smoothly because I found I could restore my UX backup to the UCG, although I inherited an odd problem with the guest network that refused to go away, even after factory resets. The captive portal simply wouldn’t behave properly. I spent months exchanging logs with Ubiquiti support before eventually solving it myself by rebuilding that part of the configuration and moving the guest network onto a pair of dedicated U6+ access points.

Each upgrade improved something. The UCG made routing faster. The U6+ access points improved Wi-Fi coverage. Performance steadily crept upwards.

Eventually I admitted what I’d been trying to avoid for years. Wi-Fi wasn’t really the issue. I’d built an increasingly capable wireless network on top of an increasingly inadequate backbone.

Copper beats radio

Our house is now around 35 years old and was built long before anyone imagined every room might need multiple network connections. Indeed, back then, volume home builders only put single electrical sockets in rooms - not even double sockets. As a result, there are very few convenient routes for new cables without lifting carpets, taking up floorboards or opening walls. There are certainly no risers and there’s no structured cabling.

When we extended the house in 2009, I asked the electrician about installing Ethernet while the walls were open.

“You won’t need it,” he told me. “Wi-Fi is the future.”

Foolishly, I listened to him. Wireless certainly got better. But I’ve yet to find a radio signal that beats a piece of copper.

The frustrating part is that I missed the opportunity twice. We extended the house again in 2018 (converting the loft) and, once again, no Ethernet went in.

A weekend with a drill

Last weekend, my long-time friend Stuart – a former IT Manager who has retrained as an electrician – gave up much of his Saturday to help me fix the problem properly.

Rather than trying to route cables internally, we ran external-grade CAT6 around the outside of the house, following the path of an old telephone cable before bringing it back inside where it was needed. Three cables now leave what I affectionately refer to as “the datacentre” – an IKEA wall cabinet in the garage.

One link feeds the Man Cave, another terminates in the dining room where an old coaxial TV socket once lived, and a third is simply spare. Knowing me, it probably won’t stay that way for long.

Then, this week I finished the job by replacing the last of my ageing unmanaged Netgear switches with UniFi switches. The UCG now connects to a UniFi USW Lite PoE switch, which powers the U6+ access point in the hallway as well as providing wired connectivity to the rest of the house. A USW Flex Mini switch lives in the Man Cave alongside the backup NAS, while the remaining UX units now do what they were always meant to do: provide wireless coverage in the more awkward corners of the property, rather than trying to compensate for a weak backbone.

Finally, a network that makes sense

For the first time since I started this journey, the network architecture actually makes sense.

The house now has a gigabit wired backbone between the key locations, with Wi-Fi used where it adds value rather than where it has to compensate for missing infrastructure. There are still a couple of Powerline links serving the loft, but they’re now the exception rather than the rule. And the U6+ AP in my office is powered with a PoE injector and connected over a mesh to its peer in the hall, but that seems to work well - even if it is technically inferior to a wired connection.

The difference is immediately noticeable. Roaming between access points is smoother, latency is lower and large file transfers are finally limited by the broadband connection rather than by the network inside the house.

I’ve also added a UniFi Travel Router, which deserves a post of its own. It uses the UniFi Teleport VPN, which allows me to connect to public Wi-Fi while securely tunnelling back to my own network. That means I can browse through my own internet connection, access private resources safely and avoid relying on whatever security the hotel or café happens to provide.

The journey

The network didn’t change overnight. Looking back, each upgrade solved one problem. Unfortunately, I fell into the trap where we often optimise the thing we can see instead of fixing the thing that matters.

2009: House extension
❌ Didn't install Ethernet on ground and 1st floors.

2018: Loft conversion
➡️ Installed AmpliFi HD
❌ Missed additional Ethernet cabling opportunity for 2nd floor

~2023: Move to UniFi
➡️ Replaced Amplifi HD with 4x UniFi Express
➡️ Replaced Powerline Ethernet adapters for "up to 1Gbps"

~2024: Fibre broadband, more capable routing
➡️ Upgraded WAN from FTTC to FTTP
➡️ Replaced 1x UniFi Express with UniFi Cloud Gateway Ultra

~2025: Improved Wi-Fi
➡️ Installed 2x U6+ access points, turned off 5Ghz radio on 2x UniFi Express to direct modern devices to more capable APs

2026: Fixed the foundations
➡️ Upgraded WAN link from 100 to 150Mbps down (18Mbps up)
➡️ CAT6 installed = wired backbone at 1Gbps (10Gbps capable)
➡️ UniFi switches
✅ Network finally behaves

The evolution of my home network in recent years.

Foundations first

It’s taken several years, more money than I’d originally intended to spend, and 100m CAT6 cable to get here (and I should have bought more).

The irony isn’t lost on me. I spent years buying smarter networking equipment, tweaking configurations and chasing new features, only to discover that the biggest improvement came from putting the right foundations in place.

There’s a wider lesson too, because, in technology, we often assume the answer is another appliance, another feature or another layer of software. Sometimes the real answer is to fix the infrastructure underneath.

That’s true in my home network. It’s just as true in the organisations I work with every day. In my case, it turned out to be couple of lengths of CAT6 cable.

My sons haven’t been home to comment on the Wi-Fi yet. We’ll see what they think next time - or whether they still say “You should have kept the AmpliFi, Dad”.

Current network

Device	Purpose
Vodafone router	Modem only: Wi-Fi disabled
UniFi Cloud Gateway (UCG) Ultra	Router and UniFi controller
UniFi Lite PoE	Core switch
2 × UniFi U6+	Primary wireless access points (guest and private SSIDs)
3 × UniFi Express (UX)	Additional access points (private SSID only)
UniFi Flex Mini	Man Cave switch
UniFi Travel Router	Secure travel networking

Still on the list

Replace the remaining Powerline Ethernet links by running another CAT6 cable into the loft.
Use the spare external CAT6 run (potentially for more CCTV or maybe the loft connection).

Future-proofing

CAT6 (rather than 5E) means I can upgrade the wired backbone to 2.5Gbps or even 10Gbps one day.

AI isn’t killing consulting. It’s killing time as a proxy for value

markw@markwilson.co.uk (Mark Wilson) — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0100

“Why am I paying a consultant for something AI can do in 15 minutes?”

I’ve heard variations of that question several times over the past few months. On the face of it, it’s a perfectly reasonable one.

Generative AI can draft documents, analyse data, write code and create presentations in a fraction of the time they once took. If the work now takes minutes instead of hours, why should customers still pay the same?

The answer is that they were never buying your time in the first place.

Rewind a decade or so in IT consulting

About ten years ago, I was regularly delivering a consulting engagement for risual. We called it a Vision and Scoping Document and it typically took around ten days to complete.

My sales colleagues would often describe it to customers as a “ten-day engagement”. Every time I heard that, it grated.

The customer wasn’t buying ten days. They were buying clarity — a clear understanding of where they were, where they wanted to be and a roadmap for getting there. The ten days were simply our estimate of what it would cost us to deliver that outcome.

If we found a better way of working and delivered it in eight days, we’d make a little more profit. If unforeseen issues meant it took twelve days, that was our problem, not the customer’s. That’s how consulting should work.

Yet, for years, we’ve become comfortable describing knowledge work in terms of days, hours and rates. Time became a convenient way of pricing expertise, even though it was only ever a proxy for the value being delivered.

It’s not just consulting

A couple of weeks ago, I collected my car after some repair work. The invoice listed one hour of labour at £95 plus VAT, alongside the cost of the replacement parts. The only problem was that I’d only been at the garage for around forty minutes. So I queried it, and was told “It’s a plug in.”

That was the garage’s shorthand for a fixed-price job. They weren’t charging me for exactly sixty minutes of someone’s time. They were charging a standard amount for carrying out that repair. In other words, it was already value-based pricing.

The irony is that they were already selling value — but presenting it as time and materials. Time was simply an easy way of arriving at a price. By describing it as an hour of labour, they’d encouraged me to question the price instead of the outcome.

The locksmith test

Imagine calling a locksmith because you’ve locked yourself out of your house. They arrive, examine the lock for a few moments, insert a couple of tools and, within thirty seconds, the door is open.

Do you argue that the bill should be lower because it only took thirty seconds? Of course not.

You’re paying for the years it took them to learn their trade, the specialist tools they’ve invested in and the confidence that they’ll open the door without damaging the lock. You’re paying for the outcome.

Indeed, if they spent two hours trying different techniques before eventually getting you in, you’d probably have less confidence in their expertise, not more.

We rarely question paying for expertise when we can see the outcome immediately, so why should consulting be any different?

AI changes the economics, not the value

Warren Buffett famously observed that “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”

For years, we’ve treated time as though it were synonymous with value. AI is forcing us to revisit that assumption. Because customers aren’t buying typing. They aren’t buying prompt engineering. They aren’t buying someone to spend ten days producing a document.

Customers are actually buying judgement, experience and confidence. They’re buying better decisions, reduced risk and faster progress.

AI changes the cost of delivering those things, but it doesn’t diminish their value. If anything, it increases the importance of knowing when to trust AI, when to challenge it, and how to turn its output into something genuinely useful.

AI is already an extraordinary amplifier of expertise. Put it in the hands of someone who understands the problem they’re trying to solve, and they’ll often deliver better work, faster than ever before. Put it in the hands of someone without that experience, and they’ll often produce something that looks convincing but lacks the judgement that comes from years of practice.

AI compresses effort. It doesn’t compress experience.

Anyone can ask AI to generate a strategy document, but producing one that reflects an organisation’s objectives, culture, constraints and appetite for change is something else entirely.

The commercial shift

I don’t think AI is going to kill consulting firms. I do think it’s going to accelerate the move away from charging for effort and towards charging for outcomes.

The firms that continue to sell “ten-day engagements” may find customers asking increasingly uncomfortable questions. Those that sell measurable business value, and use AI to improve the efficiency of delivering it, should become more competitive, not less.

Perhaps that’s the biggest commercial shift AI will bring. Not the end of consulting — but the end of pretending that time is a good proxy for value.

Mark's Thoughts

Which Mr M Wilson?

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Finally, a network that makes sense

The journey

Foundations first

Current network

Still on the list

Future-proofing

AI isn’t killing consulting. It’s killing time as a proxy for value

Rewind a decade or so in IT consulting

It’s not just consulting

The locksmith test

AI changes the economics, not the value

The commercial shift