There’s a saying down here in Florida: If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes. But when hurricane season rolls around, you stop waiting and start prepping. Sandbags, bottled water, batteries, gas cans—you name it, it’s on the list. And last year, despite checking every box and topping off every tank, I forgot one big thing: how much I rely on the internet.
You don’t think about it until it’s gone. It starts with the lights flickering, the power cutting out, and you think, “Alright, time to bust out the flashlight and pretend this is a fun little camping trip.” But then the cell towers get overwhelmed, the Wi-Fi drops, and suddenly, you’re living in the 1800s—except your neighbors are posting memes about it from out of town and you’re sitting in the dark, refreshing your phone like a maniac.
That was me last September. A storm ripped through our part of Florida and knocked out the power and internet for five full days. FIVE. If you work remotely like I do, that’s not just inconvenient—it’s borderline catastrophic. Deadlines don’t wait for the grid to recover.
Thankfully, a couple months before that storm, I bought myself a little gadget called the Ryoko mobile WiFi. It was one of those impulse buys—something I figured I’d use while traveling or maybe at a coffee shop when their Wi-Fi is slower than a turtle on muscle relaxers. But let me tell you, that little box earned its keep during the blackout.
While my neighbors were running extension cords to generators and fighting each other for the last remaining signal bars, I was sitting at my kitchen table—fully online, Zoom calls running, emails flying out, projects uploading. The Ryoko was cranking out 4G LTE like nothing had happened. I had it hooked up to my laptop and my phone at the same time, and the thing didn’t even break a sweat.
Here’s what makes it so useful: It’s portable, fits in your hand, and doesn’t require a tech degree to use. You press a button, it finds a 4G LTE signal, and just like that, you’ve got fast, secure Wi-Fi wherever you are. It’ll run for hours on a single charge, and the signal’s good enough that my wife and I could both work off it—no buffering, no dropped connections, just solid, dependable internet while everything else was knocked out.
We didn’t skip a beat. I even filed a couple of reports and knocked out a video call with a client in Chicago while palm trees were doing cartwheels outside. It was surreal. But it also gave me a kind of peace of mind I didn’t know I was missing. When you’re staring down a power outage and a busted router, the ability to stay connected—to work, to check in with family, to just watch something that isn’t the Weather Channel—becomes a lifeline.
And this isn’t just a hurricane thing. Since then, I’ve used the Ryoko when I’m out in the boonies fishing with my buddies, when the coffee shop Wi-Fi goes belly up, and even in the car on a road trip when someone needs to take a Zoom call. It’s basically become part of my everyday carry.
Now, I’m not here to preach or peddle. I’m just telling you what worked for me. If you live in a state where Mother Nature likes to throw tantrums—or if you’re just tired of depending on your internet provider’s idea of “reliable service”—having a Ryoko in your kit is a no-brainer. I honestly don’t know why it’s not just standard issue for folks who work from home or travel a lot.
Because when the lights go out and the towers start dropping like flies, it won’t be the power company or the cable guy who keeps you going—it’ll be whatever you’ve got in your back pocket. And for me, that’s the Ryoko.
Want one for yourself? Don’t wait until the next storm to figure out you needed it yesterday.