A Big Year-End Thank You to Our Internet and Wi-Fi Providers

Before Thanksgiving Megan McArdle wrote about her candidate for less obvious hero of 2020: supply-chain managers and operations chiefs; i.e., the men and women who got the toilet paper and meat and rice from the office buildings and restaurants to the grocery stores and homes.

Well, it’s Christmas now, not Thanksgiving, but Christmas is a good time to give thanks, too, so let me give thanks to another group of people who helped get us through this pandemic so far and who we haven’t thought much about.  My candidate is a dog that didn’t bark; i.e., somebody who did their job and who we didn’t notice because nothing much went wrong, even though things changed entirely: The companies that provide us our wi-fi and internet.

In January, i.e., before the pandemic, people got internet at work and school and home.  By April, people got their internet at … home.  Offices were closed.  Schools were shut.  People were at home.  Working at home.  Going to school at home.  And streaming video when they weren’t working or going to school because they couldn’t go out.

And it all worked.  The internet was there.  We probably didn’t even stop to think about it – because it was there.  So, we owe a big thank you to our internet and wi-fi providers for building a system that provided the services we needed in a way nobody ever thought we would need.

One final point: The whole thing is even more interesting because we were told, three years ago, that the Federal Communication Commission’s repeal of the so-called “net neutrality” rules the FCC had adopted in 2015 at the behest of the Obama administration, would break the internet.  It didn’t.  In fact, the internet has gotten faster and capacity has increased over the last three years.

But the main thing is a thank you to our internet and wi-fi providers, who have helped get us through this pandemic by giving us the internet we needed to stay connected when we couldn’t stay together.