The Blog

What would be the life of a mobile worker without a decent Internet connection that enables him to work remotely? I’m telling you: a REAL nightmare.

For many years I’ve been working remotely from an incredible number of different places equipped with a WiFi access, should they be hotels, airports, coffee shops, fast foods, museums, streets, friends’ places, ships, etc. and all those experiences I lived taught me one thing: we can never be sure in advance of what we get in terms of Internet connexion speed. The only way to know how good a connexion is, is simply to try it.

Of course, the Internet connection speed varies from one place to another, depending mainly on the number of users connected at the same time (I will never forget how I struggled once to be able to download a few emails, using the same hotspot as 200 Russian Navy Cadets in Hamilton’s harbour, Bermuda, who were sucking all the bandwidth available to feed youtube and torrents download). However, we’ve all, at least once, experienced the frustration to use an Internet connection which would supposedly allow us to surf the web at 2Mbits/s but which at the end is not even able to let us use Skype correctly or stream a video. So why is that?

In most cases your Internet speed test only tells you part of the picture.

makeuseof.com has published a thorough review of how the Internet speed tests operates and explains with nice drawings the causes of Internet speed not being what it seems.

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A must read for all of us who want to learn how to deal with that and keep cool.

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