Back in my day, we needed a satellite for good wifi connections!
A story of resourceful technology usage and a strange living situation
Am I the only one who remembers using a wifi satellite?
Let’s take a trip down memory lane shall we? My first apartment in San Francisco was rather unique. Yes, it was a pretty basic studio apartment on the ground floor of a 100+ year old building. It made up for its lack of square footage by having a lovely backyard with a prolific fig tree that helped supplement my meager grocery budget. And the location couldn't be beat as it was literally a block away from my job at an ad agency that had taken over the space of an old Victorian house.
My living situation
So technically this studio apartment was on the same electrical service as the apartment that was two floors above it. My de facto roommate/landlord was an Italian woman in her 90s. Yes, the city of San Francisco had to consider us to be roommates since the laws at the time (and probably still) didn't allow her to legally rent out this extra room at a market rate two floors below her spacious rent-controlled three-bedroom apartment that she had been occupying long before I was born. So I had to essentially agree to not sue her. I was paying about triple the rent she was despite having much less living space. But hey, it was still reasonably priced for the time, and kudos to her for being resourceful with income streams in her advanced age!
We could be roommates but I couldn't technically be her tenant. And because of this, I couldn't have my own mailbox or utilities accounts. It all seems silly now, but as a naive recent college graduate I had to obey the rules and make it work. For example, I had to place a large envelope outside of my door. When mail came in my name, the old gal upstairs would hobble down the hall with her cane and play the role of mail deliverer. When she saw anything questionable on the utility bills, she'd tell me to use less water or remember to shut off the lights. I did my part to keep the costs down.
What is a wifi satellite?
And another big thing I did to keep costs down was to use a small desktop satellite dish to connect to the internet. It sounds crazy right? But as I wasn't able to get my own utility accounts setup, wiring up my own internet connection was difficult to impossible. The apartment upstairs would need to be the one on the account, and trying to explain the internet to an elderly woman who barely spoke English wasn't really an option. So I got resourceful.
I purchased a wifi satellite dish. The purpose of this little device was to amplify the wifi signal on your computer. If you normally saw the closest 10 wifi connections on your machine, you could plug this satellite into your USB port and theoretically you'd be able to connect to dozens more networks over a larger distance. It sounds sketchy now, but back then most people didn't bother putting passwords on their wifi accounts. There were typically several open internet connections for me to connect to.
I should be clear that I was doing nothing too nefarious here. I wasn't hacking into anyone's protected network. Many of the networks that I connected to were legal public networks or signals from nearby restaurants and cafes rather than individual residents. This setup wouldn't have been nearly as convenient if I was in a more remote setting. But being in one of the more densely populated cities in the world made for plenty of nearby options. This arrangement was partly out of necessity since I couldn't get utilities setup in my unit, but it also made a lot of economic sense for a recent graduate.
And with so many open network connections in the area, did it really make sense for me to add another one for my minimal online needs at the time? I could still connect for most of my needs at work and it was a much simpler time when streaming and downloading at home was fairly minimal for most people.
No one else that I knew ever used one of these satellites. Maybe they weren't terribly common. But I had not just one but two of them. When my old Sony laptop finally died, I upgraded to an iMac. Sadly, the iMac required the Mac version of the wifi satellite (essentially the same thing but with Mac drivers and painted white instead of black). Both of the devices lived on my desk pressed up against the window with a clear view into the lovely backyard facing dozens of other wifi signals. It rarely had any issues and allowed me to peacefully connect for nearly two years.
Conclusion
Of course all good things must come to end. I eventually found a great new job that wasn't a block away anymore. Without that occupational proximity, the tiny studio apartment lost a lot of its luster. I was able to find a larger place across town for only slightly more money. And lo and behold, I was able to come out of the shadows and become a legitimate resident! I could have my own mailbox and utility accounts! And of course, I could get an actual internet service provider to give me fast internet service without the need for a satellite!
I think we all have similar fond memories of the crazy things we did when we were first branching out on our own in the world. Maybe for some people it was only eating cheap ramen noodles for dinner every night. Others may have dragged huge baskets of laundry to the cheapest laundromats many blocks away. Or maybe you just had a ton of annoying roommates. For me, I was fortunate enough to live alone in a shoe box of an apartment that actually did have laundry in the building! But I'll always remember the great lengths I had to go to just to get a decent internet connection.
Thanks for reading, I’ll see you next week!
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