Parents working from home. Kids playing video games or on the iPad doing remote learning. Everyone’s glued to their smartphone. And the Zoom meetings — the blessing and curse of 2020 — seem to just keep coming. It’s an all-too-common scenario in American households as pandemic-related shutdowns continue.
It could also be messing with the smart thermostat — or any of the host of IoT devices that adorn consumer households which, if all functioning at once, can overload the internet capability and cause the Wi-Fi to flake out during that Zoom call, prompting cries of “You’re freezing up!” from exasperated coworkers.