How I Test a City's Wifi Before Committing to It

Wifi is the one thing that can make a city unworkable, and it's the one thing you can't verify from home. Listings lie. Reviews say "fast wifi!" from people who watched Netflix.

Here's the process I actually use, refined after getting it wrong a few times.

The numbers that matter

Most people check download speed. Download speed is the least important number for our work.

Upload is what breaks video calls. You need maybe 3–5 Mbps up for a clean 1:1, more if you screen-share. Plenty of connections advertise 100 Mbps down and deliver 5 up — fine for streaming, marginal for a client meeting.

Latency and jitter are what make you sound robotic. Under 50ms to your usual region is comfortable; over 150ms and calls get awkward regardless of bandwidth. Jitter — the variance in latency — is the actual culprit when someone says "you're breaking up" on a connection that tests fine.

Packet loss is the silent killer. 1–2% is enough to degrade a call badly while a speed test still reports great numbers.

So: upload, latency, jitter, loss. Download is a distant fifth.

Before you book

Check what the country's infrastructure actually is. Vietnam and Thailand have excellent, cheap fibre. Bali runs on a mix, and it varies enormously by neighbourhood. Parts of Latin America are fine in capitals and rough outside them. A quick search for "[country] internet infrastructure" tells you more than any listing.

Look for submarine cable news. This sounds paranoid. It isn't — Vietnam in particular has had repeated multi-week degradation from cable faults. If the country depends on two cables, know that going in.

Read listing reviews for the word "work." Not "wifi" — "work." Reviews mentioning calls, remote work, or Zoom are from people with our requirements. "Great wifi" from a holiday traveller means it loaded Instagram.

Ask the host directly, specifically. Not "is the wifi good?" — they'll say yes. Ask: "Could you send me a screenshot of a speed test, including upload? I take video calls for work." A host who sends one promptly is a host who has thought about this. A vague answer is your answer.

The first hour after arrival

Test immediately, while you can still leave.

1. Run a speed test — but pick a server in the region you actually work with, not the nearest one. Nearest-server results are flattering and meaningless if your clients are in New York.
2. Run a ping test for two minutes, not two seconds. ping -c 120 1.1.1.1 and look at the deviation line, not the average. Consistency matters more than speed.
3. Make an actual call. Ring a friend, screen-share, talk for five minutes. This surfaces problems no synthetic test will.
4. Test at the hour you actually work. Residential connections degrade sharply in the evening when everyone's home. If you work US hours from Asia, test then — that's your reality, not the quiet mid-morning.

If it fails, you've learned it on day one with time to move rather than in week three with a deadline.

The backup, which is non-negotiable

Get a local SIM the day you land, with a generous data plan. In most of Southeast Asia this is $5–10/month for effectively unlimited data.

This is the single most valuable thing in this post. Wifi will fail — a router dies, the building loses power, the neighbourhood has an outage. It always happens mid-call. Tethering from your phone takes ten seconds and turns a crisis into a small apology.

Test the tethering before you need it. Some carriers throttle or block hotspot use on cheap plans, and you don't want to discover that with a client waiting.

Things I've learned the expensive way

Power cuts and wifi are the same problem. Your laptop has a battery; the router doesn't. In places with an unstable grid, "good wifi" means nothing without the SIM backup. This is why the SIM is non-negotiable rather than nice-to-have.

Coworking is your insurance, not your default. Even if you love cafés, knowing there's a reliable space fifteen minutes away changes how you handle a bad wifi day. I've bought day passes purely to take one important call.

Test the café before you rely on it. Same drill, faster: speed test, check upload, note whether there are outlets. Keep a mental list of three places that pass. You need the redundancy more than you need the perfect one.

Beachfront and mountain views correlate with bad internet. Not always, but often enough that I now treat a spectacular view as a yellow flag worth an extra question.

The short version

Ask the host for a speed test screenshot before booking. Land, test upload and jitter at your real working hours, and make a real call. Buy a local SIM the same day and verify tethering works.

That's it. Fifteen minutes of work that has saved me from three bad months.