I’d read that our internet bandwidth in America lags behind other countries, but I tended to brush those statements off. I have 20MB cable at home, and our office connection is faster. Seems plenty fast to me! Well, I’ve just come back from a week of living on a low bandwidth connection just across the state, and let me tell you, it was NO FUN.
I was working remotely from Baker City, Oregon (pop. 10,000), where my lovely wife is completing a rural medicine rotation (she’s a 3rd year medical student.) My first shock was that despite being just 1.5 miles from downtown, her connection was via Satellite. We could literally see the building the ISP was housed in, but they couldn’t get a line out to her building. Satellite internet isn’t unusably slow—500K to 1MB—but it comes with some brutal daily download caps. 200MB a day. Yikes!
To put it into context, a Netflix video might be 20 times that size.
When you hit your cap, your connection is throttled down to modem speeds (which is basically unusable). I think I hit the cap in 10 minutes the first day. You can pay $5 for a “restore token” that resets your 200MB, which I did several times over the week.
At one point, I went downtown to try and work via a coffee shop’s wireless while sipping an americano. That worked one day, but the next, everything ground to a halt. When asked, the barista explained that the “internet gets slow sometimes”… Turns out, the entire city has network problems. There are a limited number of lines into town, and they get saturated. They can’t get the backbone provider to upgrade, so everyone just deals with it, including the hospital, offices and, yes, coffee shops.
By the end of the week, I’d found my most reliable internet source was not the local ISP, nor the Satellite connection, but rather a Verizon cellular dongle. But I didn’t want to use it for everything, as it also has bandwidth caps. I was regularly switching between Satellite, cellular and the local coffee shop, all attempting to optimize my limited supply of precious bandwidth.
I’m glad to be back to the world of fast internet, but a few lessons will stick with me. I can definitely tell which websites were optimized for fast load times, and my experiences with those services were much better for it. I’ll be taking more time considering optimization and low bandwidth experience on many of my projects.
It’s great for people to talk about this, since many in urban cores assume the issue has been solved. It’s far from solved. I was just writing about the same thing in rural Canada on my blog: http://vocamus.net/dave/?p=1282.
Great post, David. I can really see it hampering the growth of smaller communities. I have to say, if I moved to Baker City or any other low bandwidth town, I’d have to immediately begin a grass roots campaign to make an upgrade happen for the city.