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How Digital Nomads Can Get Fast Internet

A high-speed internet connection is essential for being a digital nomad.

Laptop on beach

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that digital nomads — people who travel the world working online — have a need for speed. Fast internet can mean the difference between running a successful location independent business and going home to get a normal job. The very freedom of the digital nomad lifestyle is contingent on internet speed and fiber has become the new highways of the 21st century.

Types of jobs that require digital nomads to have fast internet

Writing

One of the main professions that digital nomads do is in various types of writing: journalism, blogging, or more mundane online content creation. All a traveling writer needs to operate their business is a device and an internet connection. Having fast internet is essential to be able to quickly search the internet for source material, publish posts, and communicate with clients. Without this, work ceases to be the freedom providing escape from the 9-5 and more of a gridlock inducing doldrum as large portions of the creative process are spent waiting for pages to load and posts to publish.

Film making / video

If you want to travel the world producing video content, you need fast internet. To put it simply, uploading video material to the internet requires a lot of bandwidth. So whether you’re a YouTuber, and Instagram creator, or a filmmaker who needs to send footage or backup their content to virtual servers, a fast internet connection is essential.

Day trading

You can make a lot of money day trading. You can lose a lot of money day trading. While it is one of the best ways to make a living traveling the world — like writing, all you need is a device and an internet connection — it also puts you at the mercy of your internet speed. Not knowing what the market is doing in real time is often the difference between profit and loss, so being physically located in places where the bandwidth freely flows is a fundamental part of the profession.

Marketing

While marketers can often work from anywhere in the world, they too are tied to places with fast internet speeds. When your work requires a little bit of everything — making websites, writing, video, communicating with clients, and giving online presentations — a slow internet connection can blow everything up. The world of advertising and promotion moves fast, and without internet speeds that can keep up you’re going to be left behind.

E-commerce

Selling products online is one of the best ways to turn travel into a profitable — rather than purely enjoyable — experience. As you travel the world you can come across unique and interesting products that you can ship to anywhere for a small profit. You can also run successful drop shipping operations or even manufacture your own products in overseas factories. But to do all of this you need a solid internet connection. It doesn’t matter how good our products are if you don’t have access to the world you intend to sell them too.

How digital nomads can get fast internet

Travel to bandwidth hubs

The first step that digital nomads can take to get fast internet is to travel to bandwidth hubs. A bandwidth hub is simply a city — or even an entire country — with good fast internet. Finding them is easy. Just pull up a map of the places with the fastest internet and construct a path of travel that uses them as key nodes for doing heavy duty work or uploading large files.

Check internet speeds

But even within bandwidth hubs, the internet between places can vary significantly. Before checking into hotels / hostels / AirBnbs for extended lengths of time be sure to check their internet speeds. You can do this easily by using sites like Speedcheck.

Pay more for ultra fast mobile data and use a WIFI hotspot

One trick of the digital nomad trade is to get ultra fast mobile internet and insert the SIM card in a portable WIFI hotspot. This enables you to use your laptop, phones, and other devices to work from anywhere you an get a data signal.

Conclusion

While the romance of being a digital nomad is that you can travel freely all over the world, the reality is that you must direct these travels around places where you can access fast internet. Digital nomads don’t just travel for recreation — travel is a core part of their work and having the proper equipment and internet connection is an essential part of the job.

 

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