Our Opinion
Fabio reports that if it’s a tech issue, “I don’t rest until I fix it.” If it’s the fault of the Internet company, he’ll call as many times as he needs to to hurry them up and get his Internet back more quickly. In the meantime, he uses a friend’s Wi-Fi. Like Fabio, if Nicholas can’t sort it out himself as soon as possible, he’ll resort to heading out to a cyber café, or he’ll find a free Wi-Fi spot around town.
Ada “used to have backup connectivity – even a phone modem was okay for small tasks.” But now she resorts to smartphones as a backup, though she finds the price prohibitive. She tries to wait patiently if her Internet is down for a day or so until it gets fixed. If it’s more than a day or if she has something extremely urgent, she uses a public hotspot or asks friends to use their connection, provided they aren’t in the same boat. Phil notes how easy it is to forget the old ways of doing things. That said, he still has a dial-up modem for emergencies if he’s stuck without coverage. Yet when there is an Internet outage, “it reminds you how massively reliant and addicted you are on what we’d call in the UK ‘hot and cold running Internet’ and instant gratification.” Having spent time in tech support, he has a lot less tolerance for technical problem solving. If it takes too long to sort it out, he doesn’t get any satisfaction out of solving it, so he tries to use outages as an opportunity to connect with “old timey” ways of doing things. “One of the best things it teaches you is a whole raft of forgotten analogue, delayed gratification and electricity-free ways to develop ideas, connect with people, and make art.” Alex replied, “Ethernet, baby!” He’s wired his apartment for it. He also has a ton of books in his queue to keep him occupied.
Kenneth switches to a mobile hotspot. He loves that the Android hotspot can connect up to eight devices. It serves him well as long as he’s not streaming. Again, this just happened to me recently. Lightning hit a dead tree next to our house, stripped the bark off, and knocked out our Internet package. That’s the downside of having a package that includes Internet and TV. When it goes out, you have nothing. We had to wait until after the weekend to get it fixed. Additionally, we have a shared data plan between the four of us in the family, and my adult children had already used up all of the data, meaning the phone company was adding 1GB for $15 every time we ran out, and it had already happened a few times in the month, so we had no mobile data to use either. I went without as much as I could one day while using a personal hotspot off my phone a few times. The next day I ran to my parents’ house and used their Wi-Fi in the daytime and used my personal hotspot at night. But I racked up many more $15 charges in those two days. Thankfully, the Internet connection was repaired the following Monday, and that Tuesday gave us a new month of data.
Your Opinion
Do you do the same as our writers? Do you find free Wi-Fi around town or borrow from friends? Do you use a personal hotspot? Do you just go without? Or do you also have an “old timey” backup like Phil? Do you have a personal story of when you had to do without? What do you do when you lose your Wi-Fi connection? Add your thoughts and experiences to our comments section and let us know!
