At the Mercy of the local WiFi police

[AZgl1800]

I am vacationing in the Colorado Springs, Colorado mountain area.

The location is a remote secluded campsite that is very popular and well maintained. Apparently, that attention to maintenance also goes to providing Internet access to the patrons here.

The WiFi access is pissing off quite a few of the folks who have stopped in here from my conversations with others staying here.

Using Speedtest.net which will record all test attempts for you, I have decided that the local IT techs have instituted per connection speed regulation.

1.5 mbps down is max that you will get, I am now up at 05:00 hours local time and the available speed is no better than it was in the evening hours. That speed is good enough for casual surfing, but not for looking at pages full of images.

Uploads are maxed out at 0.6 mbps

I can access this forum reasonably well, but Facebook is so slow as to make you want to go elsewhere.... albeit because of the heavy images that are so prevalent in FB.

Trying to read the news is difficult because of the heavy preponderance to wanting to put a video in every news clip.

sigh, but at least I do have access....

I have brought along with me, my own little Verizon MiFi device, but it is useless as there is no cellphone access here either. Verzion's only service back here in this canyon is on 1x. My sister has a flip phone that only uses 1x and she can take and make calls.

my Samsung Note 4 blithely informs me there is not service period.
The 4g/5g VZW MiFi "JetPack" router is useless, it displays "No Service" on the LCD panel.

oh well, life will go on I suppose. Just not like I had planned for it.

[Pierre]

so it would seem that the that the local IT techs have obeyed their Manager,
& who is the one who is paying for that Internet Access themselves,
or maybe on behalf on the person who is actually paying for it. ..

& that would be normal, in your Local Coffee Shop, as well.

[kc1di]

May be they are trying to force you to relax and take time away from the Internet
I have sympathy for you as my home connection is only max of 2 gb I'm on fixed income and can't afford hundreds of dollars a month for faster service.
but we make do.
enjoy your time away.

[Pjotr]

A hard cap seems a bit overdone.... Dynamic caps, dependent on the amount of actual internet users at any given time, would seem more logical.

And that's no rocket science, either: I've set it up like that in some occasions, by means of the excellent QoS configuration options in the Tomato router firmware....

[AndyMH]

1.5Mbps - luxury!!!

Until about 18mths ago our download speeds were 100k. Now after a lot of waiting, a lot of lobbying and some government funding, we now have 30Mbps. Without that change I would never have come back to linux - impossible to download anything to play with.

Needless to say, I live in a rural area, nor would I wish to change it for anything else

[AZgl1800]

1.5Mbps - luxury!!!

Until about 18mths ago our download speeds were 100k. Now after a lot of waiting, a lot of lobbying and some government funding, we now have 30Mbps. Without that change I would never have come back to linux - impossible to download anything to play with.

Needless to say, I live in a rural area, nor would I wish to change it for anything else

oh, am I ever familiar with living in a rural area...
my home internet is on DSL at 10 mbps with occassional blips up to 11.5 mbps
uploads at home are capped at 900 kbps

I used to live in Phoenix, AridZona and had cable there at 50 mbps,
my friends there report that has been upgraded to 150 mbps of late.

[michael louwe]

.

.
In general, 1.5 Mbps should be fast enough for web-surfing and streaming SD or non-HD videos.

In Firefox, you can disable auto-playing news videos by going to the address bar, type >about:config >media.autoplay.enabled to false. If there is the Shockwave Flash plugin installed, >Ask to activate. ... https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1150702

The Adblock Plus add-on/extension helps.

[Faust]

.... the excellent QoS configuration options in the Tomato router firmware....

Yes indeed !
Big Tomato fan here .

.... Facebook is so slow as to make you want to go elsewhere....

Well I'd consider that as an added bonus .... why not enjoy the rural surroundings instead
Sorry to sound cynical , but NOT a big fan of FB here ...

[rado84]

Whoa, I thought USA would have better mobile internet access (not Wi-Fi), considering it's a far more advanced country than mine. Here in my country every summer I go to a town called Velingrad and at 2.5 miles from the cell of my operator (Vivacom) the download speed is 5 Mbit/s (upload is about 3 Mbit/s) in day times. At evening and night it's impossible to get whatever speed because the bigger part of the residents and the guests of the town use Vivacom as service provider (it's the cheapest provider with the best coverage).

[Portreve]

As time marches on and Millennials become the dominant demographic, it seems this will have to change because they likely won't tolerate a crap telecommunications grid any more than you folks or I would tolerate just having no electricity, plumbing, etc.

[AZgl1800]

the USA is such a huge expanse of country, that covering all of it with cellsites is just not practical... low population density will not give the carriers enough revenue to do that.

and here where I am now, it is in the Rocky Mountain range, and the laws of physics preclude a cell signal getting back in here, unless a cell tower is on top of a peak, and then the antennas are very rigid as to their beam width.... go up or down a few hundred feet and you are outside the zone.

if I am within 10 miles of a Verizon tower, I can get uploads around 20-30 mbps.

if I am within a mile or two, the SNR is very good, and I have clocked once or twice at 45 mbps.

5g is now coming to the USA and they are promising us a better cell tower coverage to support that. surely hope so.

[rado84]

if I am within 10 miles of a Verizon tower, I can get uploads around 20-30 mbps.

I can only wish our towers were so powerful.

[Schultz]

If I were on a vacation the last thing I'd want to do would be on the internet.

[trytip]

hmmm 1.5mpbs per customer times 100+ residents . you know back in my day connection was 4kbps and i still managed to download at least 10,000 nudies just fine. something we had installed back then was a small program called patience
today every website is designed for super computers with jetpowered engines. meh, that's progress for you

[PETR0NIUS]

That's kinda like what I felt like trying to get on to Second Life(super heavy graphical virtual world) on dialup. It took about a minute for me to see any changes that I made, but for some reason chat worked quite well in real time. They actually stated that a high speed connection was required and that dialup would not work. It did if you had the patience of Job. Perhaps there may be a way to use multiple WIFI connections simultaneously with some sort of cooperative data merging. Is that even possible?

[jimallyn]

I can access this forum reasonably well, but Facebook is so slow as to make you want to go elsewhere.... albeit because of the heavy images that are so prevalent in FB.

Until fairly recently I was on dialup, and my connection speed was typically 24 kbps. With slow connections, it works better to use the mobile site at m.facebook.com. I also use that when I am playing with some antique computer with little RAM and slow CPU. Give it a try.

[AZgl1800]

good idea, will do that, i have a 2nd problem in that the Dell' power cord charger was toasted by the bad RV mobile charger that was spiking 200+ volts every 5 seconds.

I have a Universal charger from Best Buy "guaranteed" to work, but Dell does not recognize it as a valid charger, and posts a message that the System Speed will be reduced to prevent harm.

add that to the slow internet, and it is not good here now

[Pierre]

I have a Universal charger from Best Buy "guaranteed" to work, but Dell does not recognize it as a valid charger, and posts a message that the System Speed will be reduced to prevent harm.

saw that quite recently, that Dell thing about "the System Speed will be reduced to prevent harm".
& even when that charger was replaced with a higher output charger, which was supposed to be correct size,
that Dell still wouldn't work at full speed, & I'd eventually burnt out that new charger, whilst moving some files
off the Dell HDD and onto an ext Usb HDD so that Dell will get ditched as un-useable.

[AZgl1800]

I got an email that the "new old stock" Dell charger for this model N5010 laptop is home waiting for me.

so, the ole Dell better get back to being "like new" again, or it will join the dust heap out back.

[killer de bug]

I am vacationing in the Colorado Springs, Colorado mountain area. [...]
The WiFi access is pissing off quite a few of the folks

Who needs Internet while in vacations? Cut off the link, it's good from time to time.