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Jonnax

This will be great for those smaller towns which have been suffering a drain to the cities for decades.

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What are good small towns to work remote from?

I consider "good to work remote from" to mean

- High speed internet

- Somewhat reasonable way to get to airport for office time (e.g. Michigan Flyer has bus service from East Landsing to the Detroit airport.

Personal bonuses

- Mountains, trees, and winter

- Low cost of living

Chattanooga, TN, but don't tell too many people :)

I wouldn't call a population of 170k people a "small town" but it does look nice.

Fair enough!

Nationwide is based in one of those smaller towns (Swindon, pop approx 220,000).

Only mid-sized towns, really. At least currently, very rural areas often lack the infrastructure to allow several people in the household to use video streaming (calls for the parents, youtube etc for kids) simultaneously. Starlink could change that, let's see. But unless you get at least 50mbit/s to every household, remote work won't really be possible for many. And sadly, many countries are far from having 50mbit/s available in rural areas.

I personally love the Scottish Highlands but internet is unbearably slow anywhere but in a few major cities. Let's hope Starlink can meet demand of those areas.

So Anecdata for me. I live in the rural west highlands in a village of 200 people.

I have 900/100 FTTP and 4G connectivity is available anywhere in the village on EE. With lack of contention you can get 100Mbps down stream over 4G

I did have to pay for the FTTP install (FTTPoD) but when compared to the reduction in property prices it was easily offset.

Even without extra money for FTTPoD, the village has FTTC and a couple of cabinets so most get decent coverage, and the houses next to the exchange have straight FTTP.

Ok maybe I should reconsider moving there, last time I visited (just before Covid hit) I had the impression that most smaller settlements have very poor connectivity (both mobile and from talks with people living there).

yeah it's definitely still worth checking where the local cabinets are and distance to any property, but it's possible to get good Internet in most areas, and property (outside of places like Skye that are super-popular with tourists) are a lot lower than cities like Edinburgh.

I've lived here 7 years and gone from using 3 Bonded DSL lines to get 12Mb/s to where I am now over that period.

I'm in this position. I run ADSL + NBN satellite.

Come school holidays I put all the TVs/iPads etc on one and the other for my work. Still a pain with slow internet but it limits it. ADSL is 3.5mb down and satellite is 30mb but latency is worse.

I'm looking at bonded networks currently to improve, plus when Starlink gets to me I think I'll keep a second connection as I heard there are a few dropouts and will be a while for the satellites to number enough to mitigate that.

Anyway, it's not ideal but it works ok and lets me live rural.

I live just outside a small town (3,000 population), and I get 20mbit/s up and down via a local WISP that uses Ubiquiti PTMP hardware atop the local water tower. I pay $125/mo for the privilege, but it is enough for both me and my wife to work remotely with both of us nearly always on video calls.

> but internet is unbearably slow anywhere but in a few major cities

There's only one city in the Highlands - Inverness.

Fort William had decent internet last time I was there. Probably not a city by most standards but the biggest place around there so it does feel like a major center. But maybe their connectivity is also a result of the tourists coming for Ben Nevis.

What about lte connections? I live 40km from Berlin and I get 5G. 4G would be quite decent too.

40km from Berlin isn't really rural though. Try going 100km further. I recently drove through rural Brandenburg & Saxony close to the border to Poland. Some villages had 2G, I also encountered (tiny) villages with basically no mobile connection at all. I can understand why people are forced to leave for bigger cities if you cannot even get reliable 4G or decent internet at home.

The highlands are difficult. They have lots of hills, lots of bedrock very close to the surface, and low population density. It’s hard getting any mobile coverage in some areas let alone 3, 4, or 5G. It’s even tougher on the islands as cables can get damaged and microwave links perform poorly during winter storms.

4G in the highlands has massively improved in the last 5 years thanks to the ESN project.

The area I live in (west highlands just past the Rest and be thankful) has good 4G coverage anywhere in the village and even on the road up to the A83 now.

Whilst the ESN project has been a bit of a disaster overall it's really helped rural connectivity.

I'm really curious if Starlink et al. will change the region over coming decades. Its attractiveness is undeniable. I'd be surprised if remote places (esp islands) receive more interest if fast internet is available everywhere.

Mobile data in Germany is very, very, very expensive. An hour of video meeting consumes around 1GB (I think, probably even more), you can not keep up with the cost, I think.

Absolutely. Vodafone sells unlimited data (incl. 5G) in the UK for £26/month (~30€), in Germany the maximum you get is 40GB for 60€/month. And 40GB is nothing if you are on the road a lot. Other providers are similar.

You are lucky. Germany is the absolute worst for good 4G connection outside the cities and along some autobahns.

I posted a couple days ago my anecdotes about Germany's internet when visiting there, even inside big cities the 4G connections are spotty. I have first-hand experiences with Hamburg, München, Frankfurt and Berlin.

I still experienced many times signal drops from 4G to 3G in Berlin late 2019, it's baffling coming from the perspective of Sweden.

that's far from universal.

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