Swimming in The Pool with Speedify

We're presently at The Pool, a coworking facility in Colonia Juarez.

We've been coming here on Mondays while our AirBnB is cleaned. We've been hitting up different shared office spaces around the city to see which one will be our once-per-week home. The Pool is far from perfect, but it's the best so far and it's only two blocks away from our apartment. We checked out three others and settled here. Maybe I should have a separate coworking review post.

Anyway, the Internet here is pretty bad. It's not for a lack of infrastructure; there are access points everywhere. I just think they didn't buy enough bandwidth from there ISP and there is no redundancy, so there are signal drops and frequent outages. Also, max bandwidth available to users is about 10Mbps. I shit thee not. My job requires frequent teleconferences, so this is not awesome.

Being a good geek, I looked into and found a way to add some fallback redundancy to my Internet connection, mostly to keep the teleconferences going. Speedify pools all Internet connections available to your computer to create single, fault-tolerant connection. So, for example, here at The Pool, I am connected to their crappy WiFi and am also tethered to my iPhone Internet connection using a USB cable. That way, when the WiFi drops off, Speedify automatically grabs bandwidth from my iPhone data plan. But wait, there's more! I also added a third Internet connection -- a cellular modem from AT&T with unlimited data. Speedify grabs this connection as well and uses it for fault tolerance.

My iPhone is on the Telcel network, AT&T uses the old Iusacell network, and The Pool is on, I believe, Telmex. That's three different networks, which should theoretically further reduce potential outages. I've been using this set up for about three weeks and I've been very happy with it. I have had zero interruptions during that time. I also use it in the apartment, even though my bandwidth is great there. Speedify just makes it nearly flawless. Bonus, the AT&T modem has been giving me between 10 and 20Mbps (and up to 40Mbps once!) and not the advertised 5Mbps.

I didn't mention Speedify is also works on iPhones -- it can pool available WiFi with your cellular data making that connection more reliable. Also, it's a VPN, which means you don't have to worry about barebacking a dodgy WiFi connection. Do I trust the folks here at The Pool? Sure -- but I'd rather have some additional safety.

All this to say -- Speedify rocks. I don't have anything else to compare it with as I think they're the only ones on the market offering this service. It's not free. I think I paid $100 for the year. Honestly, I don't see myself ever not using this.

In Mexico City? Check out The Pool.

Learn more about Speedify here.

Below is the cellular modem I use with AT&T Mexico.

Still here

Hi folks --

Just a quick update. This is Andy. Dar and I are still in Mexico City and are really enjoying it. We've done quite a bit of travel since January. We went to San Antonio once to trying to get my Mexican citizenship and deal with some house stuff. Got the house stuff sorted out, my citizenship, not so much. Caught up with some friends while there and visited my parents.

We also went to San Diego -- I had work to do and Dar visited her family. I went Chicago for work then returned to San Antonio again to work on getting my citizenship -- got it finally! Yes, I'm a Mexican now. Awesome.

Then we took off to Ecuador for ten days. Amazing experience! Such a beautiful country! The people are some of the nice folks I've ever met.

Upon returning from Ecuador, we spent a month in Puerto Vallarta. Great city! Fun and lots of good food. I got my scuba certification while there -- can't wait to get back in the water.

Now we're back in Mexico City, living in Colonia Juarez. By far the best location of the four we've stayed in so far.

We're traveling to Cancun and Playa del Carmen next. I hope to update more soon -- but that will do for now.

So many details left out -- well, all of them really. Need to catch this thing up. Suffice to say, we're loving life and absolutely grateful for our good fortune.

Presently Somewhere, Andy