4 ms·
My parents still live in the house I grew up in. It's about 30 miles from the nearest big city, a top-10 U.S. city. - They had dial-up until the early 2000s.
by bane 6y ago
My parents still live in the house I grew up in. It's about 30 miles from the nearest big city, a top-10 U.S. city.
- They had dial-up until the early 2000s.
- Then they had that terrible asymmetric satellite service where the upstream service was also dial-up. That lasted a couple of years.
- Then they got some kind of two-way sat service. Still terrible latency, but tolerable for the time.
- Finally, sometime in the early 2010s cable television service made its way to their neighborhood. Television, not internet.
- About 2015 they were finally able to get cable internet, which they have today. It's an amazing 5mb/sec up/down.
When I go there I just tether to my phone because its faster. They never got DSL. I bet they'll never get fiber. Starlink could be a serious improvement to them even at 2x the price they pay now.
- limomium 6y agoSo why can't they get Internet via a phone like you do when you go there?
- Townley 6y agoData caps and throttling make it prohibitively expensive. I’ve done it for weeks in the past, and (what I personally consider normal usage) burned through my monthly cap in a week, leaving me with large overage charges that wouldn’t be sustainable long-term. I haven’t heard of a US carrier-provided plan that’s less than several hundreds of dollars, and if there is one it’s likely unavailable in rural areas
- dwild 6y agoThere's actually resellers that are made for rural areas with unlimited data. They are quite expensive, but not several hundreds of dollars expensive. I'm pretty sure I have seen some less expansive but here's one: https://unlimitedville.com/plans https://unlimitedville.com/plans
- jhauris 6y agoFor a year my family used 4G as our home internet (this was around 8 years ago). At the time it was incredibly expensive because you pay by the gig used, and the pay scale is built around using a couple of gigs. Watching a couple of episodes on netflix bumps you into a higher tier for the month. Downloading and then uploading a single 1GB artifact for work could bump you up 2 tiers. I've looked around a bit, and the situation doesn't look much better today; you can pay for a certain data cap, and then pay something like $10 / month / GB over that.