Elsa McIntosh
Orkney has bad wifi, but for some reason Stenness is the worst. It is so bad that it is stopping us getting on with work. We cannot communicate with family members and friends. Only one person can be uploading or downloading something at a time.
During the first week of lockdown there was a BT engineer at our house to try and fix the internet. It turns out that there was a fault in the line. A couple hours later the line was fixed, but nothing had changed; the internet remains as bad as before.
The average speed for good wifi in 2019 was a 25Mbps upload speed, and for some people that is considered slow compared to what they might have. But, here in Stenness, we only have an upload speed of 0.08Mbps, and a download speed of 0.28Mbps. That is not enough to upload my homework to Teams, or for my sisters to show their teachers some work on Seasaw. Mum and Dad have to use a personal hotspot on their phones to do their work.
It is important that our wifi works because we use it everyday and for many things. I use it for homework and so do my sisters. Mum uses it for her work. We cannot use our wifi to connect to my sister’s dance class. We have to use a hotspot. This is costing us a fortune as we have to buy extra ‘data’ to cope with how much we use it.
Kim McIntosh, my mother, explained that working from home using bad wifi is: “Frustrating!”
She said: “A lot of the work that I do requires, video calls, email, access to teams and uploading and downloading documents, so I do need a strong internet connection for lots of those things. Sometimes I am just not able to participate in team meetings and conferences because the internet just can’t cope with it. I sometimes have to get inventive with how I keep connected.”
