The holidays are upon us and that means relatives. It means movies cuddled up by the fire.
Unfortunately, it also still means work.
The world has changed in so many ways since I was kid, yet it’s still the same old game. We strive to be welcoming hosts who put our guests at ease but it seems no matter how much we plan, some things still get spread thin. We can stock up on more egg nog and even buy a second ham. But with so many people in one home with so much to do, we've never found a way to get extra Wi-Fi.
We definitely strive to be attentive to each other and make every effort to spend time face-to-face sans electronics, but life doesn’t stop just because it’s the end of the year. There isn’t some magical winding-down of things that need to be done. We still have deadlines and the boys still have schoolwork. In this advancing paperless age, that means Wi-Fi. This season in particular, we have family piled on top of all that. My brother comes over and seems to be doing a lot of reading on his tablet. I mean, he’s quite efficient about cramming it in during his bathroom breaks…but it’s still another draw on the little stream of invisible interweb juice we have.
Add in the nightly streaming Christmas movies and we have pretty much zero bandwidth left for, well, anything.
And Lord knows, since Chelsea’s little sister moved in and started working from home, we're seriously gasping for air Wi-Fi!
Our sponsor Google – in their endless effort to conquer the world's electronic problems – has turned to an early nineteenth century war strategy from the birthplace of French toast. Yes sir, that Napoleon Bonaparte taught us a fine lesson in dealing with the enemy.
Divide and conquer!
In this case, the enemy is the very limitation of Wi-Fi itself.
Google Wifi is the brilliant strategist serving as our own Napoleon. Similar in stature, even, Google Wifi takes our valuable home resource and helps us command its use with ease. Not only does Google Wifi act as a system of connected Wifi points, advancing world wide web rays into every room, it manages and controls them like garrisons. One Wifi point plugs into our modem and sends signal out to the remaining Wifi points throughout the house, working together to deliver one strong signal, riding forth like little Internet war scouts bravely bringing it to the front lines of our phones and tablets and computers. Our devices get strong Wi-Fi from whatever router is nearest to them, meaning that my sister-in-law can work from her room and Chelsea can stream movies and the boys can do schoolwork and my brother can read on his…throne…all at the same speed as if they were standing in my office.
As cozy as it would be to have all these people standing in my office all at once, this suits us better.
If the routers are like garrisons, the Google Wifi app is like a seasoned Wi-Fi general. I set the system up with a few easy clicks that make sure every corner of our house is covered. On top of that, I can set it to select which device gets priority over Internet bandwidth (hint: it's me, I always get priority) and I can even put on a “Family Wi-Fi Pause.” This allows us to limit the tablet usage of our kids when they’ve been watching way too many of those noisy kid cartoons that teach them next to nothing.
Now, no matter who shows up, we can get our work done faster and get to the fun stuff sooner. We can run the holiday season like a general.
A present-wrapping, cookie-making, Christmas-movie-streaming general.