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

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.

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.

Trials and tribulations of the first world!

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.