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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

My wife and I have been looking for a property out in the rural parts of Michigan. One of the homes we went to visit with our realtor had left out a laptop computer in order to test the internet. Damn thing has ADSL and gets 2.2mbps down lmao. I do not miss the ADSL days.

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My home used to get 4 Mbps down until water got into the paper insulated trunk lines and became unusable. My new pair maxxed out at 2. So happy that all my broadband internet surcharges were spent on improving the customer experience.

The Thumb area has been getting direct home fiber through a power company co-op. Been pretty great, I got mine like 6 months ago.

Before this we didn't even get DSL because the lines were so degraded.

I've been pleasantly surprised to see a lot of rural fiber from MEC - https://www.teammidwest.com/internet/

>Damn thing has ADSL and gets 2.2mbps down lmao.

Had they considered an infrastructure upgrade to carrier pigeons, cans on a string, or smoke signals?

I started calculating the bandwidth for a continuous stream of carrier pigeons carrying 256GB flash drives, at different frequencies.

But the latency and loss rate would make it all worthless.

Latency definitely, but imagine pigeons carrying 8TB M.2 PCIe Gen-5 sticks strapped to their backs. That's some crazy throughput rivaling most domestic internet connections.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/9of84w/ne...

Rings true for me. In my younger days I was "privileged" to catch an early morning flight to San Jose with a stack of tapes that I then drove to Palo Alto. All because a RAID array had gone kaput and tapes in a carry-on provided better bandwidth than the upstream from the office where our backups were.

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