Ask HN: Can I live with slow / capped rural internet?

6 points by spookylettuce 5 years ago | 8 comments

I work as a remote developer / data architect. I currently live in town with unlimited gigabit internet. I'm considering moving to a beautiful rural home that checks every box of mine except of course internet access. At the moment it appears the property's best option is AT&T fixed wireless with an advertised Typical download speeds of 25Mbps and a data cap of 500GB /mo. ($10 per 50GB of additional data up to a maximum of $200 per mo.)

I can adjust my workflow to do more remote heavy download jobs and ssh in to save bandwith. It seems workable in theory, but I'm a bit scared I will come to regret the move given my line of work. Maybe in a couple years new providers like starlink will improve my options.

Has anyone made a similar move? Am I irreparably spoiled by city living? What kind of practices / technology might I employ to ease the transition? Any advice?

aquark 5 years ago |

I live rural, though not exactly the middle of no-where, but only option is a 10/1 fixed wireless service. I work full time at home (and run a SaaS company) ... with two young adult kids at home that last few months we have been burning around 500GB a month.

Do we stream Netflix @ 4K ... no, but it is quite workable at low res, the 1Mbps upload is the most painful portion.

My cell data is faster (but 50GB\month cap) so I will use that for large uploads to save time, and also as a backup since we get frequent fixed wireless outages (esp. in summer since any storm seems to cause problems).

I also occasionally spin up EC2 instances to remote to when moving around data to avoid dragging it down locally (usually video). Works fine ... remote desktop to a Windows instance is perfectly usable.

Zoom/Google Meet/etc work OK ... not great, but perfect usuable and a lousy connection is a good excuse to turn off video sometimes!

I hold out hope for 21st century technology some day, but wouldn't switch the trade-off of being more in-town for a faster connection.

sethammons 5 years ago |

Similar. Moved to a place where spectrum said I could get 500mbps but turned out they did not service my side of the highway. Had to use centurylink 25mbps for a year until Spectrum could bore under the road. The 25mbps was actually closer to 10 and up speeds were closer to 1-2mbsp. Uploading binaries and docker images was terrible. Like go away and do something else for a while terrible. Downloading them took considerable time. I had to turn off internet for the rest of the house to prevent kids or tv/netflix from degrading my experience. Lots of voice only zoom calls to preserve audio.

In your purchases contract for your home, add the requirement that high speed internet will service your work needs for video conferencing and such. We did so. Worked with the existing owner to ensure things were installed and tested while we were six states away.

dmje 5 years ago |

We lived in the middle of nowhere for 2 years. Your 25Mbps is a dream compared to the 1Mbs we got on a good day.

I really only managed it (I run a little web agency) by having an office in a nearby town with great broadband, but there was a lot I found I could do from home by thinking a bit more carefully about what I needed when, whether I needed to download X at that partiular moment or if I could get it in the office and work on it later, and so on. The mindfulness around this was actually really good working practice, but definitely frustrating at times.

I think the cap would probably be [strangely] more frustrating to me. I could at least leave something downloading overnight without worrying about any limits.

I'd say: go for it. Living in the middle of the country is an incredible life experience.

PaulHoule 5 years ago |

My internet is now dsl that has similar headline performance as yours, probably better realized performance. I wouldn't trust anything a carrier says relative to performance. If you haven't tested a wireless system at a location you should NOT assume that it works AT ALL.

For years I had 2mbps or worse dsl and I hated every minute. Some dev you can do just fine under those circumstances. I never got into the Docker habit because Docker makes me download a few gigabytes even if I want to make a few character change.

spookylettuce 5 years ago | |

Thanks for that. Helpful. I know the property is a customer of AT&T wireless now, so presumably it works at least a little bit. I think for situations like the docker scenario you described it would make sense to keep a cloud machine running and do stuff like that on the remote machine.

phaemon 5 years ago | |

Docker works in layers. Your problem is that you've put the thing you're changing at the bottom layer so it affects everything above it. Rearrange things so that two character change is the top layer and it will make life a lot less painful.

phaemon 5 years ago |

I moved rural remote many years ago and it was a pain at the time. The only internet I could get was satellite and the latency was a killer. It still worked out and I've been fully remote since. Wouldn't trade it for anything. They brought in FTTC since so I'm in a good place. Just visit and try it out. See how you get on.

giantg2 5 years ago |

I have 30Mbps service with a 200GB limit. Even with a good bit of Youtube and Netflix use by the family, I haven't had problems, nor hit the limit (180ish GB per month). I have the video settings turned to standard definition to save on data.