Hacker News Reader

Comment by rwbcxrz | Hacker News Reader

> Fast internet everywhere - 100Mb/s+ cable, 5GHz Wifi, 4G cellular

I used to say that. Now I live in a rural area, and the fastest speed that's even available is 5Mbps (and the uptime isn't great). My house also has zero cell service from any provider.

It's also a bit presumptive that everyone can afford a 100Mbps connection. The last place I lived, it was like $120/month for 100Mbps. Not everybody can afford that.

That being said, has anyone out there come up with creative solutions for working remotely on a crappy connection?

View on HN

It may not fit your use case, but I found Speedify to be a great boon when dealing with working remotely over crappy wifi with 3g cellular. It's a VPN type app than can split your packets between two connections (e.g WiFi and my phone tethered via Bluetooth) for increased bandwidth or can send all packets over both connections to assist with lost packets or inconsistent latency.

1. A lot of places that are remote will cover or subsidize internet costs for employees 2. I think the the poor access to Internet in rural areas is more of a US thing. In LDCs we have often wider availability for low cost 4g and/or more equal distribution of telecom infrastructure in general.

Yeah and poor access to Internet in metro areas is a thing here in Australia. There's plenty of people here (myself included) in the middle of the city with 5/0.5 connections.

You have misunderstood. The grandparent is not saying that fast internet is expensive. He’s saying that there is simply no way of attaining it at his house for any price.

That describes a lot of places in the developed world. My little farming town in rural France, as well as the medium sized City in England where I lived previously.

>no way of attaining it at his house for any price

I bet Amazon jungle doesn't have gbit internet either. The question is whether OP chose a location without internet knowingly or he was cut off and left stranded.

The sad part is that in many developing countries 100mbps is now quite common. Meanwhile, even in LA it’s not very consistent when you have this speed advertised on your contract.

Only place where I reliably saw 100mbps down was in SFO on tmobile LTE by one very specific window. Go figure...

EDIT: consumer grade connections - if you have a business, gigabit is easy to get in the office.

Might be time to reassess whether the US is a "developing country", or how we bundle these metrics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com