Get your Black Friday Wi-Fi Ready before the next big sale!
Online bargain hunters during Black Friday obviously want to ensure that their family’s online shopping doesn’t fail this annual Wi-Fi test and result in empty shopping carts, not to mention the resultant wailing and gnashing of teeth. But it’s brutal out there, even in cyber space. The answer lies in a combination of potential upgrades for your Home Fibre, installing mesh Wi-Fi and not forgetting about Norton security.
Aren’t we so lucky to live in the digital age? We have instant access to global information, flexible working arrangements, online education and training opportunities, and even remote healthcare management.
And when it comes to Black Friday, we can avoid the scenes of physical chaos, in-person madness and the very real threat of being involved in an actual punch-up that used to take place every year during the annual post-Thanksgiving sales in America, and then later around the world.
[Editor’s note: The term ‘Black Friday’ started in the early 1960s. That’s how police in Philadelphia described the chaos that took place when large numbers of suburban residents came into the city to begin their holiday shopping the day after Thanksgiving. Retailers tried rebranding it to ‘Big Friday’, but the name stuck.]
Black Friday in real life used to get a little chaotic, when even normally calm and polite people were infected with the sudden desire to grab some serious retail bargains – even if it meant potentially injuring their fellow shoppers in the process. It got brutal sometimes…
Have a look at this outrageous actual footage from the UK in 2014 (in the days before online shopping really took off), or this equally eye-opening round-up from Toronto, Canada.
In the first clip, we hear that ‘…police had to be called out to a number of mini riots across the Uk’, as people battled over discounted televisions and it became a case of ‘brawn over brains’. The supermarket’s employees were powerless and even the police struggled to exert control!
In the second clip, you can see a woman in a pink top getting seriously annoyed with a man who has acquired an electronic item that she clearly thinks should be hers.
[Editor’s Note: Just watching these clips is enough to give anyone a healthy case of PTSD, which in this case obviously stands for Post Traumatic Shopping Disorder…]
Today, thanks to online shopping, the ‘cart wars’ look a little different – but if you don’t get all your digital ducks quacking nicely in a row, you still run a serious risk of coming away empty-handed and leaving the really great deals to those who are more prepared to grab them than you are.
Let’s picture the scene.
When the Whole House Hits ‘Add to Cart’
It’s 00:01 on Black Friday, and the race is on. Your laptop has around ten tabs open, including pages showcasing the TV you’ve been sighing over for months, an air fryer, a new padel racquet and some actually branded (and not from an in-house retailer) gym shoes.
A few feet away, your teenager and your tween (the latter allowed up this late because Black Friday is, well, always on a Friday) are refreshing a gaming sale website. Your partner is looking at a new mobile phone and (this time) a proper cover for it.
Even your mother – who’s come over to use your Wi-Fi because she’s still running on mobile data despite your best efforts to convert her – has joined in, comparing robot vacuums on her phone as well as looking at a new mop (she’s trying hard to join the world of digital cleaning but she still loves a good old-fashioned mop dance).
Everyone is shopping at once, and every device in the house is fighting for the same connection. And then it happens.
The page freezes. The Wheel of Death spins and spins. The checkout button has apparently taken a dislike to you and gone on strike.
This is the moment when everyone in your house lets out a groan that sounds like you were all, collectively, punched in the stomach at the exact same time. And you know, from a digital perspective, this is basically what happened!
It’s just like the worst days of load-shedding, except this time there is actual retail treasure at stake and not just a delayed cup of coffee.
The Wi-Fi has given up and so has your chance at that TV and everything else, because by the time you’re back online, it’s been sold out – to all those grimly determined online shoppers who were more prepared than you.
Does it sound familiar? If it does, you (and your very annoyed family) won’t be alone.
Black Friday is one of the busiest nights of the year for home networks, and many households only find out their connection’s (less than satisfactory) limits when it matters most: when the sale for the bargain of the year simply doesn’t go through.
And so everyone trails off to bed with visible personalised thunderclouds over their heads (with your partner grumpiest of all because he still has to do the gentlemanly thing and take your mother home).
The silver lining to the little thunder clouds over everyone’s heads is that this is one problem you can solve before the next big sale.
Upgrade Your Home Connectivity and Be Ready For Black Friday
The answer lies in looking at your Home Fibre package, your Wi-Fi equipment and – for good measure – getting some decent cyber security into the mix as well. Let’s look at it step by step.
- Start with Fibre that can keep up: Every device in your home shares one connection. When four and more people are streaming, scrolling and checking out at the same time, an entry-level line soon runs out of room. Upgrading to a faster Home Fibre package gives everyone their own share of the bandwidth. That means fewer slowdowns, quicker page loads and a checkout that goes through on the first try.
- Then make sure the signal reaches every room: Even the fastest Fibre line can’t help if the Wi-Fi signal fades before it reaches the bedroom or the back of the house. That’s where mesh Wi-Fi comes in. Instead of relying on a single router, a mesh system places a few small units around your home. They work together as one seamless network, so you get strong, steady Wi-Fi in every corner and no more dead zones.
- Make it threat-proof with home cyber security: Finally, make sure that your tween / teen / mother / anyone, really… doesn’t get caught by malware or a virus lurking in the shape of a too-good-to-be-true offer that is less noticeable among all the Black Friday real deals. Norton through Vox provides six layers of protection working quietly in the background, so your family can browse, bank, shop, stream and play without a second thought.
Together, a Fibre upgrade, mesh Wi-Fi and Norton home security can turn next year’s Black Friday from a battle for bandwidth into what it should be: a race for the best deals and not a working connection. And if you move quickly enough while your mother is still annoyed about losing the robotic vacuum cleaner, maybe you can even persuade her to take out Home Fibre and ditch the mobile data dependence for once and for all.
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