Down and Out in Mexico City (Premium)

Our trip to Mexico City on Sunday was tiring but uneventful: we stayed at a hotel near Newark Liberty Airport to avoid having to get up at a ridiculous hour and drive 90 minutes to get there two hours ahead of our 8 am flight, and that worked out well. Our flight even arrived a little early and we discovered that Mexico City finally had done away with the silly Multiple Immigration Form (“FMM”) immigration papers the country had previously required for tourists. Now, they just stamp your passport like every other country and add a notation about how long you can stay. 180 days, in our case, though we only needed two weeks.

There were a few troubling differences from previous trips, however. This was the first time we’d had to wait in line in customs, and it was a long line, and the drive to our apartment, normally about 20 minutes, was about 10 minutes longer thanks to traffic. But when we finally arrived, it all felt worth it. Roma Norte, at least, was comfortably familiar. And then we walked into the apartment.

I’m usually pretty compulsive about charging my devices on the plane, but this time I had left caution to the wind, and it seemed to work out. The HP Envy 16 I was reviewing, which had never gotten better than 3.5 hours of battery life, survived the entire 4.5-hour flight. And my iPhone still had over a 70 percent charge when got off the plane. That had dropped dramatically on the way home from the airport, to below 50 percent, thanks I’m sure to me checking the Uber directions against Google Maps repeatedly and whatever other cellular nonsense. Anyway, we wanted to charge our devices a bit and then head out for a late lunch at one of our favorite local places.

Unfortunately, I noticed while unpacking and plugging in that our Internet connection was down, and I could see a red blinking “LOS” (loss of service) light on the Huawei router that TotalPlay, our Internet provider, had supplied. Great. We then spent the next hour and a half on two concurrent attempts to get help, with me on WhatsApp and my wife on text message. My attempt was ultimately futile—after fumbling to get past the Spanish language bot-based help system, I was told repeatedly that a human who never arrived was on the way—but my wife finally got through. And after a bit of basic troubleshooting, we were told that someone would come to fix it. The next day (Monday). Between 9 am and 4 pm.

There was nothing to do about it, and by then, our phones were charged, so we headed out. There was nothing more to do: I had written an article, much of that Envy 16 review, and Monday’s Thurrott Premium newsletter editorial on the plane, and we had basic Internet through our phones: Me, with 5 GB of international data thanks to my recent switch to T-Mobile, and my wife with 500 MB per day via Verizon, so we figured we could get some basic things done later. We also have a phone with an AT&T Mexico eSIM in it, but it needed to be renewed. And I had intended to check out the local SIM/eSIM situation in Mexico City anyway. Perhaps there would be an option in there. In the meantime, I tethered to my phone, sent in my editorial via Teams, posted my one article, and hoped for the best for the next day.

But as the saying goes, you don’t know what you lost until it’s gone. And we had collectively lost track of how much we rely on pervasive Internet connectivity. In many cases didn’t even realize some of ways in which it just makes things work.

For example, we would have normally watched a show or movie on Sunday night, using the Apple TV and smart TV that we have in the apartment. But since that requires an Internet connection, I needed a plan B. I had downloaded several movies and TV shows to my iPad via Netflix—again, compulsive—and figured I might be able to use AirPlay to cast one to the big screen since both the TV and the Apple TV support that. Granted, I did have this vague memory, in the back of my head, that this wouldn’t work, and that was true: AirPlay actually requires an Internet connection, at least for the video content I was trying to cast. So that was out.

I was able to use AirPlay to play music from YouTube Music to the TV. Here, again, I was relying on downloaded content, and since I always have several of my playlists downloaded for use on the plane, that was pretty much not an issue. Oddly, the most recent playlist, inexplicably, was not available, and I know that one had been downloaded. Technology had failed me again. (Writing this reminded me to download that playlist now.)

That ended up working out because we opened the doors to the balcony, realized we were exhausted from the long day anyway, and ended up just sitting out there and watching the FlightRadar24 apps on our phones to identify the planes coming in for landings just to our south, which is kind of mesmerizing.

The next morning, we both tethered to our phones and wrote, hoping the Totalplay technicians would show up on the early side. During this time, I switched over the Windows on Arm-based ThinkPad X13s I had also brought along to review and was reminded that it had a 5G cellular connection with both eSIM and nano SIM options: maybe I could buy a local eSIM online and use the laptop as a mobile hotspot.

It turns out I could, sort of. Switching from the expired AT&T SIM that Lenovo had apparently supplied to the eSIM was easy enough, but I needed to tether my phone and use its connectivity to access the wireless providers interface in Windows 11’s Mobile Plans app. (Ironic?) This happened very slowly and tediously, and I’m not honestly sure if it’s because of Windows on Arm or for some other reason. But the short version is that I was able to purchase 1 GB of connectivity for $8 and, after a lot of waiting, get the PC online with it. That connection turned out to be unreliable: it went offline several times that morning. And worse, the speeds over the hotspot that I created in Windows were painfully slow. It was better than nothing but only barely.

The TotalPlay technicians called at 9:00 am, the earliest possible time, and said they’d be here in 30 minutes. Success! But then it took them an hour and 10 minutes to arrive, because Mexico. They were quite nice, and they spoke English, which made a huge difference. And then they spent a few minutes snipping cables and replacing optical leads in our apartment. When that didn’t work—as I’d expected—they went outside to check the tangled mess of wires out in the street. I was positive that was the problem: perhaps a truck had struck a wire or someone else working on the lines had done something wrong.

Nope. 30 minutes later, they came back up to the apartment to tell us that the lines outside were fine. So it had to be something in the building between our apartment and the street. And that meant that they’d have to rewire the whole thing. Which would take two hours. Sigh.

Fortunately, it only took about an hour. And our Internet was back to its original “glory,” which means about 100 Mbps down and 30 Mbps up. I’ve been trying to get that bumped up to a higher speed since May, and so I asked the technicians about this. They told me I’d have to call, but that yes, I could get a much faster connection. They then asked me about the cable box that was sitting there unplugged: did I want them to connect that? No, I said, I will never use it.

And then they told me something that contradicted what I had been told before: if I wasn’t going to use the TV, I should tell TotalPlay I just wanted Internet and that would save us money each month. I wasn’t aware that that was possible, indeed, was told that the whole point of “TotalPlay” is that you get everything in a package: Internet, TV, and phone. Nope. I could just get Internet.

That’s all I ever wanted, and now that we had experienced the text- and WhatsApp-based interface for the company, we figured we could get that done easily enough. As of this writing, I’ve still not done so—we also had two friends arrive in town, our first guests here, on Monday, so we’ve been busy and distracted. But I will do so during this trip for sure.

I did have time to see what speeds I could get and how much it would cost, however. We currently pay $36 per month for the Internet connection, TV (with 80 channels), and phone. But looking at TotalPlay’s website, I have multiple choices. The one I’ll get is 500 Mbps for about $45 per month. I could get 1 Gbps for $80 per month, but we’re not here enough to warrant that cost.

So that’s good news. I’ll have more to say about our technology experience in Mexico City during this trip soon.