Comment by morkalork
2 days ago
Cellular internet. Edit: I'm not saying it's a good replacement for dialup, just that I have observed that many cell phone carriers are advertising plans for it now.
2 days ago
Cellular internet. Edit: I'm not saying it's a good replacement for dialup, just that I have observed that many cell phone carriers are advertising plans for it now.
Rural mountainous areas have very bad cell coverage. When I grew up the local Verizon store didn't actually get signal and you had to drive up the road from there to take calls.
Those are the kinda places I imagine are expensive to run new installs to, so it's really phone lines or satellite
Here is "ping 8.8.8.8" showing latency over cellular internet some of the time, and I live in the centre of a city:
5+ minutes for 8.8.8.8 to respond to a ping! Or am I reading this incorrectly?
You're reading it correctly. I was astonished too.
You can spend more for the higher tier plan that won't get your traffic prioritized down into the "best effort" tier. It looks like your neighbors have already done that. You may need to buy directly from whomever is running your towers and not a MVNO to get that.
Honestly, I'm actually shocked and impressed that whatever is queuing your data up has enough buffer space to hold on the packets for so long without dropping them.
It's the Three network in the UK, not an MVNO, and I'm paying for the "unlimited data" plan. They don't offer a higher tier as far as I know.
I've been using it every day for work for at least 10 years, and it served me very well, including all my remote work through the pandemic, gaming and Netflix, sometimes downloading terabytes per month without issues.
But they've managed capacity disastrously in my area recently. For the last three months. Where I live, and other parts of the centre of town, every day for about 4 hours from 11am to 3pm, it goes offline most of the time, so the network is unusable. It's impossible to work - can't even do chat or an audio meeting.
When I ran ping, I found it wasn't really offline sometimes. Sometimes it was just such high latency and/or packet loss that it may as well be. Signal strength was good, and voice calls worked fine.
I tried three different 4G/5G routers, four different accounts, and two phones. All showed the same behaviours at the same times of day. At first folks in the Three store said I need newer 5G capable equipment, then it was a new SIM, but I tried all their options. In the end I returned everything to them, cancelled contracts, and they said it was most likely congestion, which fits the observations.
I'm amazed they haven't fixed it, as it must have been affecting thousands of customers for months, in a way that's surely obvious to any monitoring equipment.
With regard to the earlier poster's point about latency, when it worked perfectly my latency (both at home and in the office) was always at least 35ms or so, spiking randomly on a timescale of seconds up to about 400ms. Good for many things, but not the kinds of low-latency gaming, interactive streaming or other services some people take for granted. SSH felt annoyingly slow, but usable.
wtf what provider is this? I used cellular internet for a year with remote desktop for work, so this is shocking to me.
It's the Three network in the UK. I've been using it every day for work for at least 10 years, and it served me very well, including all my remote work through the pandemic, gaming and Netflix, sometimes downloading terabytes per month without issues.
But they've managed capacity disastrously in my area recently. For the last three months. Where I live, and other parts of the centre of town, every day for about 4 hours from 11am to 3pm, it goes offline most of the time, so the network is unusable. It's impossible to work - can't even do chat or an audio meeting.
When I ran ping, I found it wasn't really offline sometimes. Sometimes it was just such high latency and/or packet loss that it may as well be. Signal strength was good, and voice calls worked fine.
Many rural areas have no cellular service. I vacation in an area where Satellite, landline phone service, and some very bad DSL service are the only options. Since it's a vacation spot, we opt not to use the internet there, but there are people who live there.
Where I live in Colorado there is literally no cell coverage by any cellular provider. No 5/4/or 3G coverage in miles in any direction while outside and no matter how far up the mountain behind my house I climb.
Their maps claim there is coverage, but there is not, and they don't really care that its not true.
In very rural places, they may only have edge or 3g at best, if they have any connection.
No idea why you're being downvoted. I can right now today call AT&T and get 300Mb cellular internet for my house. It's $65/mo.