Connectivity travails led me to a new realization. I’m no longer reliant on the internet: I’m reliant on low-latency, high-bandwidth internet. The lack of it makes it impossible to work fast, turns me into a whiny irritant to my colleagues, and is generally awfully inconvenient.
“Blogging for a living” is the obvious panic precipitator when the slowness comes oozing in, but it goes further. Entertainment, shopping, even watching movies over Comcast’s On-Demand video download system … it all needs a fat, fast pipe.
Joel leaves tomorrow for the woods. There he plans to work as normal, seeing if it’s possible with the ~500 kbps connection he imagines he may get through EVDO Rev. A. My bet is that oft-undiscussed factors will weigh in. High latency, for example, is one internet annoyance that gets relatively little attention outside of the gaming community.
It used to be that people asked “could you go back to dial-up?” I don’t think I could cope with sub-megabit speeds, to be honest. What about you?
I left the states nearly a year ago to work in Munich, and they have good connections here. At least they advertise good connections. The equipment they use for their internet(its all DSL here, which sucks) seems to bottle the connections. I was used to blazing fast connections in Oregon, but now, despite the advertised 15 mbps connection, seems to be capped at 250kbps per computer. Its pathetic. Being a designer and programmer, all I care about really(torrents aside) is upload speed. Its atrocious here. Latency is always sky high, and its hard to work when you are always waiting on the connection. Can’t we just get a system that equals our needs? What is odd is how amazing fast the speeds are in Asia, and with so low costs its just silly.
Could I go back? Depends on what I wanted to do.
For personal e-mail, I could mostly give up instant gratification and go back to working offline and then uploading/downloading in batch mode. The main problem would be all the idiots who insist on sending HTML mail and similar space-wasters.
Similarly, most of my larger personal downloads are things which I *could* run overnight, given a smart download tool which could properly recover from interruptions (which are more of an issue when the session is longer).
I’d slightly miss streaming video. Streaming audio would be a notch behind that.
For work, where I’m doing massive codebase synchronizations, it’s a very different kettle of worms.
I can go for weeks on end without ‘net access (*gasp!*)
those are wonderful weeks too…..
In a recent poll, four out of five crack addicts indicated that blazing fast internet connections were more addictive than crack rocks.
I have grown accustomed to broadband at home. I’m on 2 Mbs service via cable, with internet phone service as well.
I still have to deal with dial-up at my office where I spend 20 hours per week. We’re more or less limited to checking email and placing the occasional mail order online.
I could go back to dial-up if I had no choice or if financial circumstances insisted, but it would seriously cut into what I’m currently able to accomplish at home when I’m online. I could go back…but I sure wouldn’t like it!
I’m on 20Mbps DSL (16Mbps or so according to benchmarks), and I can’t say I wouldn’t want to be without it for long. In fact, I’m eagerly awaiting the day when the housing company’s decision to hook all their buildings up to the town WAN reaches me and I can get a 100Mbps connection that way.
It might be true that there are few areas where you have any actual use for all that bandwidth – but it still has benefits even in areas that don’t include the download of large, mostly illicit media files. It’s for example pretty neat to have a 20 minute embedded video buffered in no time so you are free to skip as you need. And of course, it enables multitasking.
So yes, I’m probably addicted to bandwidth.
100Mb full duplex FTTH at home is quite nice, specially with cleverly configured DDNS and DNS zone tables and a bit of devious port forwarding & apache configs, but I can and do walk away from it all regularly.
You fucking fuckers with 100Mbit internet need to fuck right off.
Being one of the last people I know to ever have High Speed Internet – I lived for a while in the utter boonies of Inland California where it was a hassle enough getting a decent 56k connection – I don’t think I’ll ever obsess over speed.
Just connection reliability and a page that loads before I have time to read a New York Times article would be nice.
We had issues with ADSL connection when we moved house earlier this year and spent a few weeks on dial-up. Shudder.
For email and basic web browsing, it was bearable. Not fun, but bearable.
File sizes suddenly changed, though! Files that were usually “It’s only a few meg, I’ll have a quick look at it” became “OMG, it’s MEGABYTES! I’ll skip that!”
torrents trickled in overnight (and needed to be stopped to do anything else) and we became really, really good customers at a local cafe with wireless broadband!
I’d argue that high bandwidth/low latency is MUCH more important to the the percentage of the time I WASTE on the internet than the time that I’m productive on the internet.
Reading and writing text is pretty productive and as low bandwidth as it gets.
At least youve got the balls to reply directly, unlike some editors on the main page. Anyway, I’m fully expecting that at some point I’ll be fucked off this site too.
Downpressor- I’m pretty sue Rob was expressing jealousy, not hate. Chill the fuck out.