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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.

15 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. How is this news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How is this news?

  2. 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 MBGMorden · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
    2. Re:You poor baby by timeOday · · Score: 4, Insightful
      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.

    3. Re:You poor baby by robot256 · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

    4. Re:You poor baby by AK+Marc · · Score: 4, Funny

      Nature abhors a vacuum.

      Is that why my cat hates the vacuum?

      --
      Learn to love Alaska
    5. 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).

    6. Re:You poor baby by bloodhawk · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    7. Re:You poor baby by jeffmflanagan · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

  3. Even slower by Bert64 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!
  4. Re:slow and reliable vs. fast and not by Bert64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!
  5. I weep tears by WillAffleckUW · · Score: 5, Informative

    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! --
  6. More productive, too by Nemosoft+Unv. · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  7. Trials and tribulations of the first world! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  8. system design cross training & nostalgia by globaljustin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Thank you Dave Raggett