Faster Internet

I’ve lived most of my life without a fast internet connection. It taught me a lot about patience, self-control, and the virtues of slowness. But now that most of my work happens online, I’m often constrained by my network: slow upload times, unusable websites, unstable video calls… it’s not great.

My current theoretical throughput is 1.4 megabytes per second, but in reality it’s closer to a measly 100 kbps. Imagine the hassle when I need to connect to a remote server using ssh to fix bugs or upload new code without downtime: oh the anxiety!

The location where we live is buried in the French countryside, so the telecom infrastructure is under-developed. Since I’m probably going to have to stay for several months at my parents’ house until the apocalypse settles down, I took upon myself to find a solution. 

It’s not the first time I try. We are already paying $50 per month for a crappy connection, so we can’t afford much more. I looked for alternative ways to improve our Internet access, either with satellites or mobile networks, but I never found a viable solution. Until a week ago.

The French government currently offers a program for under-served regions: you buy a 4G box from an Internet service provider to replace your traditional ADSL Internet access, and part of the cost is financed by the public administration. Box, antenna, installation, everything is taken care of. We pay the same monthly price, but the connection speed is increased twentyfold. It’s no fiber yet, but it’s enough for our usage.

The only problem is that we are limited to 200Go per month for a family of four, so we still need to be careful. We can’t watch Netflix all day long, for example. We aren’t big consumers of streaming fortunately, but we do watch Youtube a lot , and I won’t be able to live-stream every day. You can pay for additional data though, $18 for 100Go, and I’m okay to pay this extra cost if need-be. 

The thing is I have no idea how much data I use in a month, so it will be interesting to learn more about my digital footprint. Overall, I’m excited to enter a whole new world of virtual possibilities.