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Surviving the Internet On Low Speed DSL

Posted by timothy on from the why-when-I-was-a-boy dept.

toygeek writes "Earlier this year my family and I moved out into the woods, where high speed is simply not available. We traded in high speed for high latency, clean air and peace and quiet. We've made it work, and can even watch Netflix and Hulu while I'm off in another room working from home full time. Read along as I share some tips about how we've made it work, and the compromises we've had to make." It can be done; low-end DSL from AT&T is also what I somehow muddled through with for most of the last 18 months; though the connection often failed and the followup support was terrible, it worked well enough most of the time, and sure beat a 56K modem.

3 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. You poor baby by 0racle · · Score: 4, Interesting

    OMFG how ever will you survive on 1.5mbps?

    5 years ago where I live finally got DSL at 768bps. 2 years ago it actually got bumped to a maximum of 3mbps. WTF are you whining about?

    --
    "I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
    1. Re:You poor baby by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Ugg, metered Internet... there is no future in that, the sooner ISPs drop that idea the better...

      I live in Texas and have Verizon FIOS, 150 down 65 up, and it is wonderful. Works all the time, amazingly fast, low latency.

      Downloading large media files or games from Steam, normally I get over 18 megabytes per second. That is faster than I can write to a lot of USB flash drives! :)

      We use a lot of streaming media in our house and while 150 down isn't required for that, it sure makes the experience nice for multiple users. The 65 meg up also helps for remote VPN connections (I work from home a lot).

  2. Amazon Prime ships faster than that by tepples · · Score: 3, Interesting

    waiting for a 20GB Steam game to install on a 1mb connection would drive me nuts

    To put it into perspective: 20 GB (160,000 Mbit) at 1 Mbps is about two days if you don't do anything else with the connection. Amazon Prime ships faster than that.