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Surviving the Internet On Low Speed DSL
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.
How is this news?
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."
Dollar for dollar, I'd gladly trade 1/3 my current speed with bursts of large numbers of dropped packets (esp. packets over 4000-5000 bytes) in exchange for almost-no-dropped packets.
Due to bursts of high packet losses, ordinary web browsers typically abort long downloads after 20-40 minutes. While SSL web pages typically load fine with the occasional glitch that requires re-loading, other secure data connections fail unless the application has a good recovery mechanism.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I have found enjoyment reading the (text!) news groups and RSS feeds via Usenet, gmane, and gwene. (I prefer emacs and gnus)
Although they are no match for the information of the entire web, I find that there are more than enough high quality posts on different topics to keep me entertained during my personal "surfing" time, and the text groups load in an instant and can be easily browsed and responses written in "unplugged" mode.
Didn't really see anything useful except for maybe the bandwidth monitoring.
Well, to begin with, for Netflix latency doesn't matter. It's streaming. As long as there is sufficient bandwidth and not too much packet loss it's going to work.
The poster's experience with the Internet is probably as bad or better than what people have to live in most of the world that isn't the US or Europe.
Until recently i had to make do with 0.5mbps dsl, and there are people who are still forced to use much slower links than this...
This is one of the reasons i immensely dislike streaming services, i would much rather schedule a download to occur at night when i'm sleeping, streaming over 0.5mbit would be very poor quality but i can download a 720p movie or tv episode while i sleep.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Annoying ads, annoying plugins, and annoying ajax crap are the major slowdowns when browsing the web.
So much faster without them - and I'm on a fast fiber connection :)
Tears that used to weep at the blinding speed of 300 baud modems after my early 110 baud modem days.
You poor poor thing.
Hint: use the mobile website and turn off images.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
We moved 5 years ago out to the country. We are within sight of town but all that is offered to be is a 4G card from Verizon. No DSL (across the street they have it). No cable (houses to the north are the last ones on the line), no WISP (too many trees close to me), no fiber (main trunk line is across the street but no branches). I feel for you ... not!
I also have the tree issue (100' Douglas firs) but I've found a WISP that uses the 900Mhz Motorola Canopy system that works pretty well through the trees. The other end is about 2.3 miles away. It gives me 1.3Mbs which is not a speed demon by any stretch but it does beat the pants off of 33Kbs dialup.
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
I bet you are being more productive too. Having a low speed forces you consider what to do/watch/download, and simply not click on every thing that comes into your mind or pops up in your mailbox/twitter/facebook/whateversocialmediayouaresubscribedto. So less distraction. I also like your batch-download; rather than drumming your fingers for 15 minutes until that file is finally downloaded, you queue it up and continue with whatever you were doing.
"Fix it? It has been disintegrated, by definition it cannot be fixed!" - Gru in Despicable Me.
internet is "doing it wrong."
Posts like these make me want to ride out to the "country" and rip that dsl out of their hands and replace it with my 600 baud modem
I live in a small, rural community myself ... yet we have both the local cable provider AND Verizon FiOS available to most homes and farms in the area.
If you *really* have your heart set on living literally in the middle of nowhere, that's one thing (and at that point, I'm not sure one can even expect DSL service?). But we've got clean country air and plenty of peace and quiet in our town of 5,000 or so people -- while still having enough customers to apparently make broadband offerings viable. (A number of people complained that we can't get a Redbox video rental kiosk in town because our population is too low to meet the corporate requirements though.)
I don't remember my 1.5Kbps DSL having high latency.
Man has first-world problem and somehow manages to survive. Film at 11!
...you are most definitely not "out in the woods". Yawn...
But it's rural enough that the neighbor's cows had to be chased out of our yard more than once.
Anyway... even here, we've got 25mbps down / 5mbps up cable internet through Comcast - and I could get 50 or 100, if I chose to pay for that. But we can see our neighbors, and perhaps the poster is living out more in Kaczynski territory.
The world, it's a changin'.
#DeleteChrome
I have att dsl and directv now with weather nation tv (it has weather and not the shit on the nbc weather channel)
comcast hsi is faster but there cable system is so far behind other cable systems much less dish / direct
He needs a squid proxy and also block the ads there.
Another speed tip: Use the mobile version of the website.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
AT&T says we can't get anything faster where I live. I only have DSL with AT&T. To get faster I'd have sell my soul to them for UVerse shit or get ComCast shit. There may be some other ripof...cable company where I can get overcharged.
Well, my wife has to use a program called OptiTime in Paris. We're in GA. When she is on there for work, ALL internet activity has to cease or she'll get a bunch of time-outs. So having only 2.0/0.2 (according to SppedTest) limits our use.
Streaming video has to have its quality lowered to show many times.
Although, hats off to NetFlix! You guys did a nice job.
Youtube is just atrocious.
See the thing is, bandwidth is like memory and other computer resources - developers and content makers assume all of us have top of the line hardware and bandwidth.
I can go on a rant here about how every damn piece of software and its updates has to install shit to 'C:' drive and I'm running out of space - no matter how much clean up I do.
And the fact that content providers seam to think we all have First World internet access. I'm in that States! I have shit access!
Back in my day, we had 300 baud modems, and we had to dial the # manually. Plus, no graphics.
So we can mark TFA as being troll...
It's an interesting article, but I have trouble sympathizing with anyone "suffering" with low speed DSL. I lived and worked in Benin, West Africa for four years, with a DSL connection that was barely any faster than dial-up. I even got myself a dial up connection as well, to compare, and found them nearly equivalent during most of the day.
Here's what I learned about it: http://www.therandymon.com/index.php?/166-Life-in-56K.html
I can tell you one thing, the idea of downloading an ISO and burning it just disappears. Youtube is not an option (I don't even bother clicking on the links). And most crappy webpages stuffed to the gills with scripts, javascript, counters, ad displayers, and the like, are useless. I did a lot of websurfing with Lynx, which I'm surprised to say was a better experience for many sites, including sometimes this one.
Good luck with your DSL, buddy. I hope you don't suffer too much during the drone wars.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
You know, just noticed something about most of the responses to this article: most people saying "I live near a major city and still only have X.Y bandwidth" are American.
This seems to be a reminder that lots of the world has awesome broadband (S. Korea anyone?) while the United States of Dysfunctional America is still struggling with crappy bandwidth and monopoly provider ISPs.
You'd think the NSA would lobby for better bandwidth so they have more interesting stuff to listen to.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
Lets get real here for a moment. It’s 1.5mbps DSL. It isn’t going to be fast. There’s nothing you can do but work around it and not try to make it something it isn’t.
Oh, whaaa! You may not be able to stream 1080p SuperHD from Netflix or HDX from Vudu, but this is fine for just about everyone. Most of my friends who are on DSL are on 768k, and I got a few friends on cable and UVerse at 1meg and 1.5 meg. They watch YouTube and Netflix, they download torrents, they play games.
Truthfully, if you are still close enough to an exchange to get DSL, you are probably in an area where you can get wireless internet (microwave). I have friends who live way out on ranches and stuff who have microwave internet and 40Mbps speeds with unlimited transfers. And if you are really out there, there is always HughesNet and CenturyLink.
Yeah, I may have 20meg at home, but I don't think I would be complaining about having to deal with "slow" 1.5, as you have options pretty much anywhere in North America to get faster via satelite, and I could make allowances (such as downloading versus streaming) to compensate if I want to do HD. I had 1.5Mbps for years up until about 7 or 8 years ago, and it was fine.
80ms ping rate isn't bad either. It's not great, but up until about 3-4 years ago, that is what I was getting on most things. So it takes a few extra seconds for facebook to load up. Whaa!
Worse, the article is really poorly written. It sounds mostly like a rant from someone who thinks he is entitled to fiber or something.
Welcome to Australia, we might even see a speed increase in 5 years.
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.
when you can afford either a phone or the internet, like me, it turns out, apparently, that i cannot get a phone line that will support a modem at all, anymore. it all goes digital shortly after it leaves my space anyway, i am told. yay. only wish i was living in the "third" world, fiber is cheaper than copper, and for my worth i would get a much better connection out there - i imagine - than anything the fubar over pots my north of merkin world is prepared to shaft me for here.
It's not so bad. I can stream Netflix OR download stuff OR play games. Not at the same time. Latency is good, about 50ms at best.
Back in my day, we had 300 baud modems, and we had to dial the # manually. Plus, no graphics.
... and we hated it. So we invented 14.4kbps modems.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
All of his incredibly insightful suggestions are wise even if you have a fat pipe. Local DNS? Adblock? A VPS somewhere when you need to look like you're somewhere else? DUH. -1, Oblivious.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Anachronistic comment. VGA, SVGA, and other nice VESA modes were commonplace by the time I got me a Zoltrix 14.4 voice/fax modem. While I remember games with EGA graphics (mechwars, test drive 2?), they predate my involvement with modems. I'd imagine they coincide with the 300-1200 baud era.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
AC first poster says,
Of course it's modded +5 Insightful....but I'll bite....
This is news because at the extremes of any system's performance you can more easily see the faults of the system.
Anyone who does internet work of any kind should try to do their daily browsing or w/e you do on a 56K modem at least once.
When you see, even just browsing the mainstream 'internet-y' sites like yahoo.com, facebook.com, nytimes.com and compare to slashdot or others...sometimes system design solutions **just click** because you see it in a different context
TFA is like a pro football player doing cross training. It's relevant to us professionally and personally too if you have nostalgia for the early days of the internet.
Thank you Dave Raggett
For many devices, KVM's are the only way to do remote maintenance.
RDP and VNC aren't much help if that server is waiting in the bios to tell you a SCSI disk is offline.
The military has nothing to do with your Internet access. Wait, I take that back: the Internet exists because of DARPA which exists because of the military; i.e. without the military the Internet wouldn't exist.
The reason you and I don't have fast Internet access is simple: The ISPs are evil, greedy, and selfish, and our government lets them get away with it. e.g. see former FCC chairman (who was appointed by Obama) go work for the cable industry and actively encourage cable companies to increase subscription fees and implement usage caps. This despite the fact that net costs to operate Internet service have decreased even though number of users and overall bandwidth usage has skyrocketed.
In other words, even though usage is increasing exponentially, AT&T and the like are spending less money overall to provide the service--yet at the same time they are increasing fees, and they are decreasing service by implementing usage caps. Why? Because even though their profits are increasing dramatically, they aren't increasing fast enough to satisfy them.
And how do they get away with it? By co-opting the government
In other words, ISPs are evil. Period.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Downtown Seattle, eh? Does that put you in the Gigabit Seattle coverage area?
- No Bounce, No Play -
To be meaningful the article should include:
The model of actual MODEM, not a Asus RT-16 that is a router only, (my hw is D-Link DSL-504T)
The version of MODEM firmware (My fw is OpenWRT Backfire)
The actual DSL protocol,
The distance from DSLAM and a model of cable, (1 kilometer 0.4 mm polyethylene)
The cappings (speed limits set by provider) and provider's policy in this matter (586k up, 8m down, unsupportive, no way to increase)
Uplink and downlink attenuation and noise margins (att 20 dB dl, 10 dB ul, margins about 20 dB)
And only with these data, it's possible to do something to improve the link.
I only had to move from Chicago to LA to experience low-end, unreliable DSL. Why did this guy go to so much extra trouble?
-
I finally fired CenturyLink's 1.5Mbps DSL after a decade waiting for their promised "upgrade" for 40Mbps+ download--for the SAME price! I am astounded at the speed of, well, everything. Videos play without "buffering." Downloads are amazingly fast. It doesn't help shitty web sites bringing in ads from all over the world to 'populate' their crummy sites, but overall I'm as happy as a clam. Wow! Just wow! The 21st century has arrived.
I know. No big deal, but I'm enjoying wallowing in all this speed for awhile!
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
We all probably know that AOL has Turboweb, now called TopSpeed, which compresses graphics. On broadband you have to specifically turn it on by clicking "TopSpeed" and "Use AOL Proxies for broadband" and "Always compress graphics" and "Turn on maximum graphics compression" for extreme cases. It works very, very well on 768 kbps DSL.
If you don't use AOL, you can use a number of accelerator programs but they constantly come and go. One of them is known as Slipstream but there are many more. They work just like AOL by using proxies that compress the graphics.
Kriston
Try having to run a program over Citrix on a laggy and slow connection.
seriously, he's complaining about 80ms ping times? i just pinged google.com and it is over 1000ms. life goes on.
I had an old Cobalt RAQ2 which did the 3rd and 4th items. It died, recently, so I'm looking at a QNAP box, which runs a version of Debian. It can do the caching DNS, but it might not be up to the caching web proxy. We've definitely noticed a difference with the 3rd and 4th items out of commission.
... by the Dew of Mountains the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning
My girlfriend and her folks cannot get any DSL where they live. Good old 56k, baby!.
Now imagine my frustration and complete impatience whenever I have to fix their computers out there in the sticks. (I'm not just their future son-in-law, I am their round the clock, personal Geek Squad). I would kill for low speed DSL there. Imagine how I have to hear it when they whine about the 'nets running slow because Winblows has to get Balmer's weekly update gifts. (They have to have it on because of what her mom does). Before you say "Satellite": That would be a viable option if it wasn't for the blasted data caps, costs, and weather causing issues.
Cry me a fucking river with your First World problems. Some people have it way worse than you!
You seem to be forgetting that in that era, games weren't targeted toward top-spec machines.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
CGA was introduced in 1981.
... Me too! :)
EGA was introduced in 1984.
VGA was introduced in 1987.
Mechwarrior and Test Drive 2 were both released in 1989.
VESA defined modes for SVGA were introduced in 1989.
v.32bis (the ITU recommendation that defined standard 14.4kbps modem communication) was published in February of 1991.
You're talking about 1991 at the earliest when you mention 14.4 modems. Realistically, more like 1992 or 1993. By then, VGA was at least 4 years old, if not 6. Even SVGA was 2-4 years old. Games with awesome graphics like Star Control 2, Wolfenstein 3D, Dune 2, and Ultima VII were being released in 1992. Kings Quest V was released in 1990; this was the final game in the Kings Quest series to offer an EGA release (alongside the VGA release). By 1991, EGA was virtually abandoned, only seen in very old games or shareware/freeware titles. Notably, Commander Keen was EGA and released in 1990.
You're saying that while your friends were playing Doom, you were downloading EGA games?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
a 56k modem "requires" another 56k modem on the other end, am i wrong?
i was thinking more 9600 actually, as i'm not into porn.
The first series was; the second series was released in 1991 in both EGA and CGA versions (yes, really.) Before DOOM there was Catacomb 3D, which was also released in 1991.
When Jill of the Jungle came out in 1992 with VGA graphics, it poked fun at Apogee for still making EGA games. Which was a bit silly given that Epic had released ZZT in 1991 with only ASCII graphics.
Personally I didn't have a computer powerful enough to run DOOM, Raptor, and many other awesome VGA games until early 1993. Besides, it's not like it's illegal to download and play games that are a year or two old.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
You just brought back some awesome memories. Jill of the Jungle!!
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.