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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."
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.
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 :)
Because of all those horrendous sites that force you to use the browser...
I pine for the days when download links were direct links to files which you could cut+paste to wget.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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.
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...
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!
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.
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.
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!
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