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.

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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.

Noscript is your friend

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[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.

I'm still at 2.0up/0.2down - AT&T

[Anonymous Coward]

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 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!

Re:How is this news?

[EmagGeek]

It's not news. It's a guy trying to generate click revenue on his blog.

His solutions aren't even that good. They are overcomplicated and unelegant.

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: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*.

Re:system design cross training & nostalgia

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Except that the author of TFA says he's using 1.5Mbps, which is twenty-five times the bandwidth of 56K (and twice the low end DSL bandwidth I have). It doesn't really stretch the boundaries of anything other than the author's patience, unless maybe he's trying to maintain a high-volume content site.