Is goshiwon wifi good enough to work on?

Korean internet infrastructure is excellent and goshiwon wifi is usually genuinely fast. The variable is not the line, it is how the building distributes it.

What you normally get: a fibre line shared across the building via a few access points. Typical real-world speeds in a well-set-up building are 100 to 500 Mbps, which is far more than video calls need.

Where it goes wrong:

1. One router for 40 rooms across three floors. The line is fine; the wifi signal at the end of the corridor is not. This is the actual failure mode.
2. Evening congestion, roughly 20:00 to 24:00, when everyone is streaming.
3. Thick concrete walls between you and the access point.

For a job with video calls, do these three things:

- Ask when viewing: "와이파이 공유기가 층마다 있어요?" — is there a router on each floor. A building with an access point per floor is a different product from one with a single router.
- Run a speed test in the actual room during the viewing. Ask for the wifi password and test it. Takes 30 seconds and it is the only real answer.
- Ask whether there is a LAN port in the room. Many goshiwon have one, and a cable removes every wifi problem at once. This is the single best fix and it costs you a 5,000 won cable.

If the building's wifi turns out to be marginal, the fallback that most remote workers use: tether from your phone. Korean mobile data is fast and unlimited plans are 40,000 to 60,000 won a month, which is cheap insurance for a job. A dedicated line into a goshiwon room is generally not possible, so this is the practical plan B.

One more thing worth knowing for calls specifically: your room is 6㎡ with paper-thin walls. The connection may be fine and the call may still be a problem — for your neighbours and for you. Study cafes have private booths for around 3,000 to 5,000 won an hour and a lot of remote workers use them for meetings.