Surviving the Internet On Low Speed DSL 277
Posted
by
timothy
from the why-when-I-was-a-boy dept.
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.
How is this news? (Score:4, Insightful)
How is this news?
Trials and tribulations of the first world! (Score:5, Funny)
Man has first-world problem and somehow manages to survive. Film at 11!
Re:Trials and tribulations of the first world! (Score:4, Funny)
Cool - Slashdot has broken through to the third world market and they are posting!
We have our films at 10 in the first world :)
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I heard they call it "sex"
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system design cross training & nostalgia (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:How is this news? (Score:4, Informative)
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*.
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I don't know what all these people are bitching about. I liked the read, thanks.
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Uhhh...how EXACTLY is "Linux" any sort of solution when it comes to bandwidth? I'd like to have that one explained please, because you can have a BSD/OSX/Windows box that never phones home and a Linux box that is a chatty Cathy and since pretty much any modern OS can use scheduled tasks I really don't see any advantage for one OS over the other.
As far as the other tips using your own DNS and using a router for QOS? Honestly? No offense man, as it seems like your heart is in the right place, but that kind o
Re: How is this news? (Score:3)
Survived on ~28kbps satellite link in the Sahara doing fieldwork. Not getting shot also helped.
What were you saying, again?
You poor baby (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, 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.
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My crummy little DSL might take a while to download a large file and has an occasional burp if two people try to stream at once, but the connection itself is otherwise rock solid. I'm connected to the line via an Ethernet cable since I'm the gamer in the house, but everyone else does just fine on w
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Everyone has opinions and priorities, and this is just a reflection of how I feel on the subject.
Amazon Prime ships faster than that (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
Station Wagon full of tapes, eh?
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Big downloads run overnight, just as they always have for me. Still faster and easier than driving to the store. It's not like I'm staring at the progress bar while downloads happen.
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Unless you're downloading from a BBS using ZModem, you can actually do other things while your computer downloads a game.
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Not by that much, and honestly I can't say that I care. I downloaded tons of Steam games on my 1Mbps connection but I mostly bought Steam games when they were on sale - I had no desire to play them immediately - I just wanted them for when I got around to it. Buy it, start the download, and then when I'm ready to play the game (which might be weeks later - I'm busy with OTHER games right now) its ready.
Re:You poor baby (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You poor baby (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
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KVM switches need lots of bandwidth
in our old office with a few T1's every time i would fire up the KVM switch app on my PC the networking guys would call right away
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In the modern world ... people use RDP which is extremely lightweight, or VNC, which isn't horrible. Both are far better than streaming video. What app do you speak of that was so bandwidth intensive?
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KVM switches need lots of bandwidth in our old office with a few T1's every time i would fire up the KVM switch app on my PC the networking guys would call right away
That. Does. Not. Compute.
Seriously, this suggests a totally messed up network setup (and/or the networking guys didn't what the hell they were doing.)
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My guess is the K and M components do just fine on limited bandwidth connections. It's the video that's the problem.
Perhaps the CLI would trim those demands down to something reasonable? GUIs are a passing fad, anway.
Re:You poor baby (Score:5, Informative)
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I won't jump to satellite, though. Here's why: I stream a LOT of shows. I mean most of what I watch is done over the internet. I may occasionally have to wait for a buffer to fill, but other than that I have no problems. Satellite comes with bandwidth caps (unless I want to be up all night taking advantage of "free" off-hour bandwidth). With all
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The article is pretty lame, and appears to merely be ad click-bait.
Up until 3 years ago I was limited to 768kbps down, and I made do without all the weird crap that is mentioned in the article (other than AdBlock). Even now -- I just checked -- I only get 3mbps down. I never really thought about this as being slow. I guess I don't stream enough videos simultaneously in resolutions higher than my monitor supports?
Re:You poor baby (Score:5, 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.
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Re:You poor baby (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
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Look into any business plans your provider offers. They're more expensive for a given speed, but are often uncapped, plus you get better customer service.
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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?
+1
I live within 4 miles of the center of a major US City and the best DSL I can get is 0.65 Mbps down and 0.10 Mbps up.
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I have friends 15 miles from Washington D.C. who are on dialup (or Verizon wireless cards) because it's apparently not cost effective to run cable or DSL to their neighborhood. My folks live in Montana. They don't even have good dialup. Forget 56k, they're falling back to 14.4kbps.
I'm in suburban VA. No DSL and my Comcast loop is so saturated that I don't even bother trying to use it at prime time.
I'm still at 2.0up/0.2down - AT&T (Score:2, Informative)
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 [speedtest.net]) limits our use.
Streaming video has to have i
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Not sure why you're not interested in Uverse if it's available. Are the Internet-only plans there unreasonably priced?
-l
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Fiber to every home? That's ridiculous. Who pays for that? Even if you get a fiber backbone you still won't have fiber for those last few hundred yards. The only way it happens is if the customer pays exhorbitant fees, like $100/month. No ISP is going to act as a charity.
Plus you don't need fiber. 768Kbps DSL is adequate for the vast majority of people, and yet we don't even have that available to the majority of the people. Stop whining about your streaming being bumpy when there are people who can
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Also, why should people in urban areas be forced to subsidize people who want to live in the middle of nowhere and then bitch because there's no infrastructure near by.
If you want the advantages of a place with a high population density, move to a place with a high population density. If you want the advantages of a place with a low population density, move to a place with a low population density. But you can't have your cake and eat it too.
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If you want food, grow it yourself.
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I would say "Yes," but it would be a lie.
Re:You poor baby (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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However...
Once you've had one, you'll never go back...
My office has 75 down, 35 up, and I can tell the difference between that and my home which has 150 down, 65 up. Not a huge difference, but there is one.
My Mother is still with AT&T on DSL, 6 down, .768 up. Complete crap experience all the way around, but she doesn't know it because she's nev
Re:You poor baby (Score:4, Insightful)
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One benefit of fast downloads isn't obvious until you think about it.
The amount of time it takes to start streaming superbit 1080P from Netflix is shorter with a fast connection, when you fast forward or rewind, it starts playing faster as well since it buffers faster.
When you have 3 TVs in the house doing this, as we sometimes do, it becomes even nicer. A 10 megabit connection would not near
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I said whining and I did it in an extremely condescending way, because the whole premise of the article is 'how will I ever survive on 1.5mbps.' It wasn't, 'this kind of sucks but oh well.' The article is whining like a little bitch for having speeds comparable to most of the rest of the US.
That's it? How ever do you manage,
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Our local equipment can handle gigibit today, but I believe the most they actually sell to a single home is 500 down, 200 up. Costs more than $200 a month however last time I looked. As it stands, I pay $90 a month for 150/65.
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He's a regular Daniel Boone, leading a life of simple-but-rewarding chores: loading logs into the log splitter as he waits for his iTunes movie to download; snow blowing a clear path for the UPS truck to deliver their Amazon groceries; or just whittlin' a shim to mount the high gain yagi antenna to the mast so he can check his Facebook down at the fishin' hole.
Whaaa! (Score:2)
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 w
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Just a case of geeks feeling entitled to internet. 1.5mbps is great for almost all uses, more than most people actually get, and all you need as long as you don't go in for bandwidth hogging uses (streaming video).
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as long as you don't go in for bandwidth hogging uses (streaming video).
Huh? I don't quite understand.
Why would you not stream video?
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Indeed.
I lived for 1.5 years in a place. Since I didn't originally know the length of my stay in that city, I contracted Sprint 4G instead of a wired network provider.
Turned out my connection was very spotty, so I had to tape the usb dongle to the window, use a USB cable extension and use a laptop to share the internet. I still had about 1Mbps, with 100ms+ latencies to Google. I streamed Netflix and hulu without much issues (unless it was heavy raining, or something happened at Sprint).
Not sure what's all t
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Using a mac is a good way to instill a lust for bandwidth.
A delta update is a few hundred meg, and the new OS versions are a few gig each. Much more if you (like any sane geek) want the compilers as well.
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Nature abhors a vacuum.
I think it's more the case that internet providers abhor someone who isn't paying top dollar for their top "Super Duper Fast" tier.
Re:You poor baby (Score:5, Funny)
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Is that why my cat hates the vacuum?
Usenet & Gmane (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Meh... (Score:2)
Didn't really see anything useful except for maybe the bandwidth monitoring.
Latency (Score:3)
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.
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See, if you had a nice steady 30 seconds (RTT) of latency, that would be fine. Your content starts streaming 30 seconds after you click play, no big deal, as long as there is no jitter. Now, what happens if latency suddenly drops to 20 seconds? Well, you just got yourself 10 seconds of streaming video in an instant. That needs to be buffered. Nobody expects jitter
Even slower (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.
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In 2000 I had a 1.5meg DSL connection from SBC in Dallas, that was considered the "baseline" for DSL back then, when did someone install slower?
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My first post dial up connection was half DSL. I think it was actually good for 850 kbs down, 160 kbs up.
Verizon swapped it out for FIOS four or five years ago.
Noscript is your friend (Score:2, Informative)
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 :)
I weep tears (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.
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You had UPS? I remember having to wait weeks for the results of our FORTRAN cards to come back to us students.
The teacher brought the stack of punch cards into the room, and I'm guessing he must have driven a Chevrolet Suburban to get to school.
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What's a cassette tape, grandpa?
More productive, too (Score:5, Insightful)
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Even with fast internet access that seems like a sensible thing to do. Sure, if I have nothing to do I might be okay with waiting for that download, but otherwise just let it run in the background. Preferably without disturbing everything else (such as video streaming, voip calls, gaming, timely communication with remote server, etc).
Unnecessary trade-off, IMO .... (Score:2)
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
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I wonder what the minimum size requirement is for Redbox.
You would think they could get those things down to pretty bare-minimum maintenance. I don't think they take cash, so the only thing really left to maintain would be the movies themselves.
You would think they could almost boil that down to some kind of maintenance mode where the disks to be removed could just be bulk ejected and then the new disks just fed in. They could almost hire someone locally to do this once a week and just have them Express
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I live in NJ, right in the middle between Philadelphia and New York City. My town has about 100,000 residents, and ranks as the fifth most populous municipality in New Jersey. We've been seeing advertising for FIOS for close to a decade now. It's still not available.
Meanwhile you're sitting on a farm in a small, rural community, with your god damn fiber to the premises. Fuck my life.
High Latency? (Score:3)
If you have access to DSL at all... (Score:3)
We're not really rural (Score:2)
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'.
Squid (Score:2)
He needs a squid proxy and also block the ads there.
Another speed tip: Use the mobile version of the website.
Cry me a river: try 56K (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [therandymon.com]
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.
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"I can tell you one thing, the idea of downloading an ISO and burning it just disappears."
I downloaded plenty of .isos while on dialup. (The first was Corel Linux, it's been a while....)
Start download manager in the morning, leave for work, perhaps stop then resume the next day if I wanted to surf in the evenings.
Not worse than awaiting a very slow and interrupted torrent today.
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An ad blocker may keep out the newest brand of leaches-- video banner ads.
Good morning, America (Score:2)
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.
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Then they would need a LOT more storage, which means a LOT more money. They're trying to stay off the radar of congress....
I have Verizon DSL, 1.5Mb down, 350Kb up (Score:2)
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.
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I'm guessing you don't have FiOS in your area yet. Verizon DSL was usable for me until FiOS came through- the DSL quality started going down immediately. The connection speed theoretically remained the same, but it dropped the connection with increasing frequency until it became unusable after about a year. I suspect they just stopped doing any maintenance on the DSL lines and equipment.
On the positive side, FiOS does work well.
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No Fios in the entire county as far as I know. But my DSL price went up about $6 over the last 3 months. I have read that many phone companies are trying to phase out DSL. I will be in trouble then, no other options where I live.
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If you have cell phone service, a WiFi hotspot using 3g (either discrete or using a cell phone) should give you comparable speeds to DSL, and might cost less. Maybe someone who has done this can comment? I've thought about switching as we have 4g available, but haven't looked into the details yet.
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"Don't have FiOS in your area yet" doesn't apply because Verizon halted FiOS expansion almost 4 years ago. If you can't get FiOS to your house now you likely never will get it. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361919,00.asp [pcmag.com]
AT&T has virtually halted U-Verse expansion as well http://stopthecap.com/2012/02/08/at-atts-rural-broadband-solution-we-dont-have-one/ [stopthecap.com]
The future of high-bandwidth Internet access in America is not bright.
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I get FIOS drops all the time. Sometime resetting the ONT box does the trick.
It all applies to "highspeed" too (Score:2)
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.
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large numbers of dropped packets (esp. packets over 4000-5000 bytes) in exchange for almost-no-dropped packets.
hmmm... try playing with MTU, packets over 4000-5000 bytes?
I have an MTU of 576 in similar setups. VOIP works flawlessly and I have 0 dropped packets. Using qdisc, I use htb, to do traffic shaping is recommended too. The important thing is to keep your cable-modem empty...
http://luxik.cdi.cz/~devik/qos/htb/manual/userg.htm [luxik.cdi.cz]
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Re:slow and reliable vs. fast and not (Score:5, 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.
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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.
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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.
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Considering that 56k modems *require* phone lines to be digital on the other end, your statements don't make any sense... unless you're talking about consumer VoIP.