💾 Archived View for sud0nim.smol.pub › low-bandwidth-lifestyle captured on 2023-09-28 at 16:00:08. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-07-16)
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My Internet bill went up by $20 since the 1st year sign-up deal expired so I've been considering switching to another tier of internet service.
Currently we have the 500 Mbps plan. Since Sac has fiber, fast internet is pretty damn cheap. All this thinking about internet reminded me I barely ever run into any issues with the 10 Mbps 2.4Ghz wifi band I use. Occasionally if I download a large file I'll make sure to swap to the 5Ghz band but even then unless it's above 2 Gb I'd rather just wait a second and do something else while it's downloading than switch over. Of course my roommate is a self described data whore so he needs something a bit more powerful and whenever I do torrent stuff it is nice to be able to utilize the faster connection.
Since most of the videos I watch are using mpv and I don't have to pull down all that extraneous website data and JavaScript, unless I'm running a large number of package upgrades with parallelized download I do not notice any buffering. I've been very comfortable on 2 Mbps connections if I allowed some time to buffer. And since I don't use social media, I'm not pulling down lots of large image files either. For a long time on my desktop PC I actually only had a weak, spotty 1.4Mbps connection due to a bad power-line adapter. I had no clue for nearly 4 months, sure videos loaded a little slower for some reason but nothing that really got in the way of usability.
When you cut out these harmful digital leaches and only use the web as a way of gathering information and media, you really don't need much of a connection to it.
So whenever I do eventually go off-grid, a stable phone hot spot or satellite connection will be all I need. Here's hoping that day eventually comes.