Signing up for internet service in a new country, over and over, as a digital nomad has turned this into a genuine routine rather than a one-time decision made once and forgotten. Here's the actual checklist that routine has produced.
1. Check the Contract Length and Exit Terms First, Not Last
Before comparing speed or price, I check how long I'm actually committing to and what it costs to leave early. This matters more for a nomadic lifestyle than for most people, but it's a good habit regardless — knowing the exit cost before signing avoids an unpleasant surprise later, whatever the reason for eventually canceling turns out to be.
2. Ask About Upload Speed Specifically, Not Just Download
Advertised plans lead with download speed almost everywhere, and upload is easy to overlook until you're mid-video-call and it's the bottleneck. For remote work specifically, I treat upload speed as equally important to download, and I ask directly rather than assuming a "fast" plan has proportionate upload.
3. Test Before Committing Long-Term Where Possible
Wherever a short-term or no-contract option exists, I use it first — testing the actual connection at the actual address for a few weeks before locking into a longer commitment. National or regional reputation is a weak predictor of what a specific building's connection will actually deliver, something confirmed repeatedly across different countries.
4. Ask What Happens During an Outage
Every provider has outages eventually. What varies is how they're handled — whether there's a status page, an estimated resolution process, or any credit for extended downtime. I ask about this directly before signing, since the answer says a lot about how a provider handles problems in general, not just this specific hypothetical.
5. Confirm What Equipment Is Included, and Whether It's Rented
Rented equipment fees add up over a long enough period, and I specifically check whether a modem/router is included, rented, or whether I can use my own hardware — a detail that's easy to miss during signup and shows up as a recurring line item on every bill afterward if overlooked.
6. Read the Fine Print on "Up To" Speed Claims
"Up to X Mbps" is a legal maximum, not a guarantee, virtually everywhere I've signed up. I don't expect to actually receive the exact advertised number consistently, and I factor that gap into whether the plan I'm considering has enough headroom above what I actually need.
Our Take
None of these six checks are exotic or hard to do — they just require asking directly instead of assuming, which is easy to skip when you're excited to just get connected quickly in a new place. Running through this list before signing has saved real frustration more times than it hasn't.
Why I Built This Into a Habit Rather Than a One-Time Effort
Doing this once, for one signup, is useful. Doing it as a repeated habit across many countries and providers is what actually revealed which questions matter most — the ones that came up as genuine surprises after signing, again and again across different providers, are exactly the ones that made it onto this list. It's a checklist built from real friction, not a hypothetical exercise.
What I No Longer Bother Asking About
Just as useful as knowing what to check is knowing what not to spend time on: headline download speed marketing claims, brand reputation surveys, and installation-date promises have all turned out to be weak predictors of actual satisfaction compared to the six items above. I've stopped treating them as decision factors, even though they're usually the first thing presented during a sales conversation.
One Last Item: Ask How Long the Company Has Actually Served the Area
A newer entrant to a specific neighborhood or building sometimes has less mature local infrastructure than a longer-established provider, even if its marketing looks identical — asking how long the specific service has actually been available at your address, not just how long the company has existed generally, has occasionally surfaced useful context that wasn't obvious from the sign-up page alone.
None of these six checks guarantee a perfect outcome, but running through them consistently has meaningfully reduced the number of unpleasant surprises across a genuinely large number of signups in very different markets.
Six questions, ten minutes total, applied consistently — that's the entire system, and it's held up well across a genuinely wide range of very different markets.
Keep it somewhere you'll actually remember to pull up next time you're staring at a signup page under time pressure.
How This List Keeps Evolving
This isn't a fixed, finished list — it has grown by one or two items every time a new signup surfaced a question that should have been asked but wasn't. Treating it as a living checklist rather than a one-time write-up is part of why it keeps holding up across new markets rather than becoming outdated.