Here’s a fact I didn’t know until recently: most home internet comes down to a single physical line, and that line can be cut by a crew with a shovel three streets away. Nothing on your end would ever tell you that’s what happened.
I found this out mid-pitch to the biggest client of my year. My video call didn’t buffer or lag. It just died. My face froze on the screen mid-sentence, mouth open, which is not the closing image you want a new client to remember.
What followed was a week of troubleshooting a problem that had nothing to do with me. Hold music promising a technician in five to seven business days. A phone hotspot that worked for exactly two gigabytes before crawling to a stop. A coffee shop wifi password taped to the register, which still dropped twice mid-call. I checked the little wifi icon in the corner of my screen more times than I want to admit, like watching it might stop it from doing whatever it was about to do next.
The actual answer had nothing to do with my router, my provider, or anything I’d done. A construction crew three streets over had cut a line while digging. My internet was never broken. It just happened to depend entirely on a wire nobody but them was paying attention to.
That’s what got me looking at Home Fi. It’s a small hotspot that pulls signal from cellular networks instead of one buried line. If a shovel finds a wire somewhere across town, it simply isn’t my wire anymore.
It showed up already switched on. I didn’t call anyone or install anything.
I can’t easily put a price on the peace of mind. The honest version is it costs less than what I was already paying to be at the mercy of a shovel.
The one thing nobody warns you about: once you’re not tied to a single line, you start noticing that everyone else still is. I’ve become the person at dinner who mentions, unprompted, that the restaurant’s card reader is probably down because of a construction crew somewhere. I am regularly correct. Nobody has asked for this information.