Can Zuku 5 Mbps internet enable learning?

Jul 3, 2021

A reader reached out asking us if the Zuku 5 Mbps internet package works well when using it to learn. We sometimes get direct questions like this or see them in the search terms of the website. So I’ll be sharing my personal experience on this subject in this post. You are welcome to also share your experiences in the comment section below.

To start off, I’ll say there are various factors that come to play in choosing a particular service. I remember I was warned against buying Zuku fiber and advised to get Safaricom home fiber instead. Because their experiences had been sour, I went ahead and got Zuku fiber and my experience has been great so far. Actually, two years on and it is still going great. Well except for a few downtimes, but nothing major to make me regret. Interestingly, the folks who warned me had issues with Safaricom a few months on.

You can read about why I still went ahead with Zuku from my previous post so I don’t have to start all over again.

Can Zuku 5 Mbps internet package enable learning? I believe your question is can you use the Zuku 5 Mbps package for your educational and learning needs without any lagging and buffering? The answer is simple, YES, and this is why I say yes.

The 5 Mbps package is for light work like email, file sharing, web browsing and streaming. This also includes video calls on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, Google Duo or Google classroom, etc. Watch YouTube, Netflix, Showmax videos or stream any video content and you will be fine. This package will be able to handle all these very well so far as the number of users or devices aren’t more than 5 at a particular time. Zuku says customers may experience degraded performance the more the number of concurrent users.

Let me put it into a personal context. I use the 5 Mbps package and have children at home. At a go I can have one watching cartoons on YouTube on the TV, another watching YouTube on a Tab and yet another on a phone, whilst I go about my work on my PC. Once we exceed this and have about two other devices trying to stream, you’ll see the buffering and lagging start. So if you live alone or with a family of less than five then you should be fine. But it mostly has to do with the kind of applications using the internet. I bet you can have 20 devices doing chats and it will work seamlessly for all.

I have also used it for online learning on LinkedIn learning, Microsoft learn, Coursera and taken exams with Vue Pearson. It did meet the speed requirement for the certification exams on Vue Pearson so it works.

Zuku fiber is currently offering double speed internet to customers so if you purchased a J5 (5 Mbps) package you will be upgraded to 10 Mbps. This is at the same price of Kshs 2,499. I asked Zuku and they say it isn’t a promotion for a short period but a permanent upgrade. So technically you will have enough speed and data to take care of all your learning activities.

If your package is or was the 2 Mbps and it has been upgraded to 5 Mbps you should be fine and not have to worry. So long as the concurrent users aren’t so much to cause the lagging.

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