Kids, there's nothing more I can do to increase the bandwidth in the house

My family has not been especially affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

None of us has (yet?) contracted the virus. I have been blessed to hold onto my job and continue earning an income. And the kids have had the opportunity to keep up with school online.

The worst things we have had to deal with are inconveniences that can only be described as first-world problems.

One of those is WiFi bandwidth.

On any given weekday, we have in our house two college kids and a high schooler in remote learning situations spending time in Zoom meetings.

Or maybe they're using Microsoft Teams. Or WebEx. Or Blue Jean. Or Google Meet. Or any of the 100 other virtual meeting platforms with which we're all becoming quite familiar these days.

The point is, there's a lot of video conferencing going on in our house, especially when you throw me into the mix. My job involves, on average, 6 to 8 WebEx meetings every day.

Three students + one Director of Communications = a strain on our WiFi capacity. Sometimes our home network runs a little slow or has hiccups.

I must say, though, that all things considered, our 1GB Internet service from WOW has held up fairly well under the strain. It's the highest level the company offers, and I'm sure it's the very least on which our family could function.

I sometimes have problems with WebEx crashing, though I'm not sure if that's a software/MacBook issue or a true bandwidth issue.

Either way, since our upgrade to WOW a couple of years ago, I can truly say I'm doing everything I can to provide the best Internet access (nowadays a basic commodity) for my family. WOW provided us with good routers and signal boosters, and the service itself is pretty reliable.

So stop bugging me, kids. Until someone lays ultra-fast fiber lines outside of our house, this is what you get.

Of course, back in my day, all I had was a 300-baud Commodore 64 modem. You could write faster than text could transmit over that piece of mid-80s technology.

And we were fascinated by it.

So stop complaining.