Digital Nomad: how to evaluate the quality of a city’s Internet connection before going there?

Digital nomadism is a way of life that offers the incredible luxury of having no geographical constraints. You can work from anywhere.

Anywhere? Really? Not quite!

It obviously depends on the activity you are doing, but in most cases, you will still need an internet connection with an acceptable speed and it isn’t that obvious.

If in France, we are lucky enough to generally have fast Internet connections (in large cities at least), it is far from being systematic everywhere in the world. And the problem is that it’s very difficult to have really reliable information before going there and testing it by yourself.

How much internet do we need?

It will obviously depend on each person’s activity

On our side, we have a consulting business: we make daily calls with our customers via VOIP and have to regularly send or download files that can be several dozen MB in size

We had measured that we were consuming about 3 GB of internet per person for work per day (so without “leisure” internet with Youtube, Netflix, …)

Counting 20 working days per month, this represents 60 GB of data per month and per person.

It’s interesting to have an order of magnitude because it allows us to evaluate what the budget would be if we went exclusively via a 4G mobile connection. Indeed, 4G connections have the advantage of being of very acceptable quality almost everywhere in the world as long as there is a population density that exceeds 3 cows per square kilometer. This is because it is much easier to add a relay antenna than to dig holes to pull cables

If you aren’t in the Atacama Desert in Chile, in the Amazon or in the deep countryside of Brittany, you will always get by in 4G but it will cost you a lot of money. As an example, a GB in 4G of data costs about 1 € in Morocco, 2 € in Mexico, 3 € in the United States, … the budget can quickly climb and we only use it as a backup if our wifi crashes or isn’t fast enough to make a call.

To measure your need, you can use a wifi pocket or the TripMode software I was talking about here.

How fast does the Internet need to be?

When we talk about connection speed, we are actually talking about two different speeds:

• The download speed that is most important when you load pages, watch a video, download files, …
• The upload speed which is important for everything you are going to “send” to the internet: sending an attachment by email, sending your “voice” during a call, …

Here too it will be specific to each one but we consider that we need at least 3 Mb/s for download and 1 Mb/s for upload. Below that, we really lose in working comfort (each page will put several pages to load, you’ll have a robot voice when you call, …).

During the last three years, we’ve travelled and worked in about 30 different countries, we usually don’t have too much difficulty to get this speed in download, it’s often much more complicated with upload. Depending on the country, we work in Wifi and switch to 4G to make our calls. It’s a budget but we don’t always have the choice. It was the case in Morocco for example.

When your speed is really right, organize yourself to reduce as much as possible the “parasitic” use (automatic updates, unwanted software using the internet, …)

Ask the Airbnb you are targeting for speed

When I do my Airbnb search, I always send a small questionnaire to the owner to ask for clarification. Two questions concern the internet:

• Is the Internet unlimited?
• Is the Internet fast? Can you give me a SpeedTest?

The first question is important, in some countries the internet isn’t unlimited. After a quota of use, we no longer have internet or at a very low speed (even in “developed” countries: we had the problem in Canada and Japan).

It is usually easy to get the answer to the first question. Much less for the second.

In most cases, the owners do not know how to do a SpeedTest and aren’t in the accommodation that is occupied by other travelers anyway. In the best case, the landlord will be able to give me the “commercial” speed communicated by the provider. This is usually a theoretical maximum speed far from reality. In the worst case, I would have to settle for a “yes, it’s fast” which means nothing. Fast compared to what reference?

Nomadlist to get an order of magnitude

Nomadlist is a site well known by digital nomads to evaluate the relevance of a city with our way of life: the weather, the cost of living, security, … and the speed of internet connection.

The approach is very interesting, Nomadlist aggregates data from severalservices offering speed tests before calculating the average. This data is a good order of magnitude, but we could see that it was sometimes quite far from reality.

• First flaw: we only have the download speed which for us is less important than the upload speed which is often problematic.
• Second flaw: it’s a hypothesis on my part but I think that speed tests are mostly done by professionals who need a fast connection and therefore usually have … a fast connection. This is a selection bias which, in my opinion, artificially increases the average speed of a city.
• Third flaw: the calculation takes into account both Wifi and 4G tests. So 4G also increases the average speed.

Wifi Map: the most reliable data

Wifi Map is an application I was talking about in this article about applications to use around the world.

It is a collaborative application whose principle is to indicate the wifi closest to where you are by providing you with the password. It is mainly wifi from restaurants, bars, hotels, …

When you use Wifi Map to connect to the wifi in a place, the application offers you to make a speed test. And the results are available on the application!

What is particularly interesting is that this is raw speed data that you can expect to get while you are there. These aren’t averages based in part on the speeds of high-performance enterprise networks.

In this example in Oaxaca, Mexico, the application lists 150 wifi spots, some of them have download speed tests.

By clicking, you can have the details of the speed: download, upload and even ping for the most expert. In this example, the download corresponds to our criteria but the upload is really right

By studying the data from several wifi stations in the same city, we can get a fairly accurate idea of the speed we can expect on the spot. It’s not perfect, you’re not safe from a good or bad surprise but it’s so far the most reliable source of information I’ve found.

If you have others, I’ll take them 🙂