Let’s get something straight… not all internet is created equal. At this point we have become so used to the ever-present internet in our lives that we don’t ever consider things like bandwidth and general signal strength from a bigger perspective. You may not know this, but despite how archaic it seems to own a landline in this day and age, if any natural disaster ever occurs, you are really going to wish you had one. Why? Because cell phone towers will be completely overcrowded with phone calls if anything goes wrong.
During 911, nobody could make a phone call in New York City because everyone was making phone calls at the same time and all of the cell towers were filled to capacity. Suddenly the older more analog technology becomes useful again… not necessarily because it’s older but because it’s alternative. This leads us to the main point of today’s blog post… the internet works in a similar way.
If you live in an apartment building, there is a good chance that you are sharing your internet bandwidth with most of the other people either on your floor or a few of the units from your floor… it’s even possible that you are sharing this bandwidth with the whole apartment complex. So what does that mean… well, imagine that the internet is the Autobahn, and on a normal day of traffic, you can go pretty quickly on the Autobahn because there are very few cars on the highway. Now imagine that suddenly everyone needs to leave Germany for some reason all at the same time, the Autobahn will be packed, and the speeds will be slowed down to a crawl. The same can happen with your internet connection.
Now that everyone is at home, every person in your building is either working remotely which takes quite a bit of data to potentially be remote logged into a machine in a completely different place, OR they are not working and streaming content on two or three different televisions in their house while also scrolling through instagram. This causes almost the reverse problem of the 911 example I mentioned earlier. Everyone has left the cell towers and is relying on their WiFi, because why not? It’s faster? But is it?
With everyone streaming content on the same internet service provider at the same time, like the Autobahn, the speeds begin to slow pretty drastically. The amount of data being transmitted as we speak is incredible since nobody has anything else going on but to sit at home and upload podcasts and steam content.
So what can you do to avoid getting caught in this traffic. You have a couple of options, you can just keep moving forward on the Autobahn until it becomes a problem, or you can jump off, and take the service road known as your cell phone carrier. The other option is to order yourself a WiFi hotspot like this. Not only will it allow you wireless and reliable internet for quite a few devices, you will also have it for when the quarantine is over, and can take it with you to the park or really anywhere to keep working remotely.
Getting a WiFi hotspot now is just a good idea if you are a future thinker. You can jump onto your hotspot if your internet gets bad, AND you’ll have it for when all of this is over and you want to take your office to a park. Either way, you win!