How to improve your Internet connection while WFH (and most importantly how to fund it)

The world has changed for most people around the world in the past few months. It has taken a while for most of us to adjust to this new reality. What was necessary before is not, what you may not even have noticed before is now suddenly essential. It is important for everyone to realize this, and change our lifestyle so that, we can make the best out of a bad situation.

Like anyone else I just found myself working from home after the pandemic struck the United States. The first few weeks were uneventful as everyone started to adjust to WFH and getting things done.

Once kids really started to take lessons remotely from school… that is when things started really going wrong.

I’ve honestly never really noticed the speed of my internet connection at home — even when I was forced to work from home for months after a surgery, the speed of residential Comcast Gigabit internet over coaxial was good enough for me.

2–3 weeks after school really resumed virtually, the Azure cloud started crashing and burning for me. There were too many outages within the Azure Cloud — most of them seemed to be related to bandwidth being redirected to more essential services (which makes sense) — a lot of networking issues, servers not being able to find other servers, or just plain hanging.

The worst was when my main Cloud Database Provider got super duper slow over the Internet. Apparently when Internet traffic spiked between Boston and Virginia, me sitting on one end got majorly affected, with database calls timing out, and taking forever to complete. Strangely enough the fiber internet in my office was sometimes slower than my residential coaxial internet at home — and then it would switch — and then, it would both be slow — clearly, things got very, very bad.

My situation is a bit difficult, because I upload a lot of stuff to the cloud for deployments frequently. I don’t really need gigabit down, I need like 200 mbps up (Azure prevents more than 200 mbps up through their pipe anyway). The only reason I got residential gigabit to begin with was to actually get the best upload speed from coaxial Comcast