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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

I've known people who have remote worked in tech with just satellite. It's not ideal/cheap and there are definitely compromises especially as video becomes more and more part of everything. So it can be done today, albeit with compromises.

5G could potentially improve the situation as well.

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A few years ago I saw a video on YouTube of a developer at Microsoft who lived in a yurt in rural Montana or Idaho. Seemed to work pretty well for him and his girlfriend. Though they never said it, I got the feeling that they did sometimes go into town for a bandwidth run now and then, probably for large uploads.

If I'm not mistaken 5G is line of sight. If so, might be more useful in flat areas than up in the mountains though repeaters could make that work.

Certainly none of today's alternatives to broadband are great. And I don't really know to what degree and under what circumstances 5G will help.

But, yeah, it can be done even in the context of a lot of tech jobs. It does require making compromises though. Probably little or no streaming video, for example.

I couldn't even imagine. My family upgraded from dialup to satellite around 2006 as a luxury, and the latency was basically unworkable for anything remotely realtime.

Even for a reasonably decent plan, the caps were also ridiculous as well. I could realistically watch maybe 45 minutes of YouTube per month.

I have a rural house with satellite internet. I work from there several weeks a year to stretch my time away from the hell that is the Bay Area. It works fine as long as all I need is access to the git server, despite the fact that I usually blow through the bandwidth soft cap within a few days at most. I usually take at least two trips into town (7 miles each way, pop. 700) to get cell service for conference calls over the course of a week.

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