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.

Comments

How is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this news?

Re:How is this news?

[toygeek]

I was afraid folks would think that. I removed the ads, they're all but ineffective for revenue anyway. I'm sorry you didn't like my solutions, but that's how it goes. If one person benefits from something I wrote, that's enough for me. Plus, I just like getting my stuff out there and being *read*.

You poor baby

[0racle]

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?

Re:You poor baby

[MBGMorden]

Amen. Until I moved 7 months ago I was on 1Mbps for the last 10 years, and actually - it ain't that bad. File downloads go a bit slower naturally and some video streaming stuff didn't work great (Youtube worked fine though), but in general web browsing was absolutely fine at that speed and online gaming wasn't an issue either.

When I moved to my current home my local ISP has a host of plans available - from a minimum of 10Mbps to a max of 110Mbps. I took the bottom plan at 10Mbps and I've still not found any major reason to go faster. Don't get me wrong I'm a big techie and spend tons of time on my computer, but I haven't yet found a need for some of the crazy internet speeds available these days.

Re:You poor baby

[timeOday]

The fact he works from home certainly raises the stakes.

Secondly, what may have been OK 5 years ago is not necessarily OK today. When tech is available, it tends to become implicitly mandatory. There are now many jobs where it would be frowned upon to not carry a cell phone, for example. Expectations rise - not just our own expectations but those placed upon us. I don't think this is recognized enough among people who always feel we should be "thankful" for everything.

Re:You poor baby

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless he's working from home in a media-intensive industry such as photography or video editing or something, I can't really fathom the need for a high speed connection. I work from home with a 3mbps link in a pretty media-heavy industry: video game development. I never really thought about download times as being excessive for all the content that I end up downloading.

Granted I'm not moving content continually, and I do initiate large syncs at night so that I'll have them when I need them. The majority of my network needs are pretty minimal text-only transactions. (Chat, VCS transfers, web browsing for API docs.) But there's still plenty of bandwidth for voip calls too.

Re:You poor baby

[robot256]

The article is pretty lame, and appears to merely be ad click-bait.

Well, he does work from home. Be a sucker and click on a link so he can have a cup of coffee.

Re:You poor baby

[AK Marc]

Nature abhors a vacuum.

Is that why my cat hates the vacuum?

Re:You poor baby

[FlyHelicopters]

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).

Re:You poor baby

[bloodhawk]

nothing much has changed in 5 years that would make working from home any harder on such a link. Unless he is into high end photo or video editing it just means it is slow to surf utube during breaks. I CURRENTLY regularly work via a 500kbps link and it is perfectly fine, most people have an overinflated view of what you actually require for bandwidth which has come from multimedia intensive sites and streaming video.

Re:You poor baby

[Bengie]

Except in the case of bulk file downloads, the biggest difference past 10mb/s is the quality of the bandwidth, like latency. My work's 10gb fiber connection feels slower than my at home 50mb fiber connection because my residential line has lower latency to Chicago, where all the popular regional CDNs and datacenters are located.

Re:You poor baby

[jeffmflanagan]

Maybe you should smarten up and not stare at the progress bar. There's this new thing called Windows that allows you to use other applications while Steam downloads. There's another thing called "life," which has something to do with being away from the PC, but I'm not really qualified to speak on that topic.

Re:You poor baby

[anagama]

When you buy food in your city store, you are accessing a myriad government incentive programs designed to ensure that every time you go to the store, it is stocked with food rather than empty because farmers went broke, or bridges washed out, or whatnot.

Usenet & Gmane

[wispoftow]

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.

Even slower

[Bert64]

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.

Re:slow and reliable vs. fast and not

[Bert64]

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.

I weep tears

[WillAffleckUW]

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.

More productive, too

[Nemosoft Unv.]

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.

Trials and tribulations of the first world!

[Anonymous Coward]

Man has first-world problem and somehow manages to survive. Film at 11!

Re:Trials and tribulations of the first world!

[JackieBrown]

Cool - Slashdot has broken through to the third world market and they are posting!

We have our films at 10 in the first world :)

Cry me a river: try 56K

[water-and-sewer]

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.

Amazon Prime ships faster than that

[tepples]

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.

Re:Amazon Prime ships faster than that

[Jeremy Erwin]

Station Wagon full of tapes, eh?

system design cross training & nostalgia

[globaljustin]

AC first poster says,

How is this news?

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.