Hacker News Reader

Comment by KMnO4 | Hacker News Reader

As someone in Canada without access to high speed internet, I can assure you that the 2% will not be only extremely rural/northern houses.

I'm less than 5 minutes to a city with fibre, yet my geography makes it impossible to get anything other than satellite internet ($100/40gb).

View on HN

Yup. Even in North GTA. Outside town on concession roads? Still expensive LTE or small companies with P2P mobile equivalents that’s junk compared to line broadband.

> yet my geography makes it impossible to get anything other than satellite internet

You just need to make friends with the landowners at the tops of the mountains.

Care to share which company ? Hows the latency and bandwidth speed with satellite.

if you're old enough to remember dialup, its sort of like that.

Sure, the company I'm with is Xplornet. I'm not happy with them but they're the only option until Starlink.

Bandwidth is around 2-5 mbps on a perfect day. Will frequently drop to 500kbps depending on the time of day, weather, etc. Several times per month I'll lose internet completely, and particularly bad storms have knocked out my internet for several days before.

I can sometimes watch YouTube on 240p, streaming music isn't too bad, and browsing text-based website (ie HN) are slow but palatable. Once the monthly cap is hit, the speed drops to 128kbps which is pretty much unusable (even for text websites).

Latency is also pretty bad. Real time conversations aren't really possible, but thankfully Zoom has a phone dial-in option. Here's an example:

    PING 1.1 (1.0.0.1): 56 data bytes
    64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=58 time=635.123 ms
    64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=58 time=839.064 ms
    64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=58 time=661.220 ms
    64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=58 time=584.197 ms
    Request timeout for icmp_seq 4
    64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=58 time=629.539 ms
    Request timeout for icmp_seq 6
    64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=7 ttl=58 time=733.270 ms
    64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=8 ttl=58 time=658.290 ms
    64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=9 ttl=58 time=590.062 ms
    ^C
    --- 1.1 ping statistics ---
    11 packets transmitted, 8 packets received, 27.3% packet loss
    round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 584.197/666.346/839.064/78.501 ms

I'm in the process of setting up a console-based laptop just to see what I can accomplish.

You might want to check out the command-line based reddit client 'rtv'. It even supports opening up links/images in your browser of choice. Supports login/comments/upvotes/downvotes.

I've found lynx to be quite useful for reading The Star, The Globe and Mail and The Economist as a clean wall of text without any annoying paywalls.

Even found some radio streams (okay, bassdrive.com) that sound pretty good at 32kbps on AAC.

Xplornet is famous for overpromising and underprovisioning. Your experience is a perfect example of the scam here. Presumably Xplornet will be filing requests for this new funding. They will then in return provide lots of new service that in theory can meet the criteria but in practice never will.

> Presumably Xplornet will be filing requests for this new funding.

I'm sure they already have them filled out. After all, they designed them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com