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I finally admitted my Costa Rica internet plan was a fantasy
I figured I could get by with a local SIM and some coffee shop wifi, but it took me four weeks and three different hotspots to realize I needed a proper Starlink setup for video calls. Has anyone else had their remote work fall apart because they underestimated infrastructure?
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christopher9438d ago
Yeah it's funny how we treat internet like it's just water coming out of a tap. We assume if the wifi works for checking email then it'll handle a video call no problem. But bandwidth and latency are totally different things when you're trying to hold a conversation with a client while a tree branch is swaying in the wind outside your Airbnb. I caught myself apologizing to a colleague once because my connection dropped mid-sentence and they said "oh it's fine, I'm used to it by now" which made me realize I was the problem, not the location. We've all gotten real good at making excuses for bad tech instead of just admitting the fantasy.
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drewgonzalez8d ago
Man that's a rough way to learn that lesson but honestly happens way more than people think. Local SIMs and cafes work great until you actually need to be on a video call that can't drop or buffer. Hotspots are decent but they can't keep up with heavy upload stuff like Zoom or Teams all day. Starlink is definitely the move for anywhere outside major cities in Costa Rica. Might be worth looking into a backup mobile hotspot too for when the power goes out or the internet just tanks. That setup saved me more times than I can count when I was working from Nosara last year.
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