onetom's posterous

If you ever have to travel to remote ares where you have only a few kilobytes/sec bandwidth, you probably don't want to spend it on software updates (unless that software is a few kilobytes of REBOL script >;P)

Well, I travel every month to Thailand where my wife and daughter is, so for me working through narrowband is a natural, casual and almost everyday experience.

GPRS or POTS dialup is ~5kB/s. It's enough for serious work.  I read and write slower than that for one... and I think most of us do..  2-3kB/s is really painful though, because I "think" faster than that.

Let's see what problems am I facing if I want to use a recent OS and a usual setup on it over narrowband Internet connection:

1st, there is Skype. It has some short, keep-alive like timeout before it drops the connection and starts a reconnection procedure, which is too short for narrowband. The problem with this is the few hundreds kB of traffic a reconnection generates. It takes 20-40seconds to login / reconnect if there is no other traffic. A login request even fails after ~2m30s if there is a constant download via HTTP at the background. Obviously I can hardly type in an SSH session during this and SSH compression just makes it even more sluggish.

I found the GTalk web interface built into the Gmail UI is more robust than Skype, but still is quite heavy for narrowband. The other, more important problem with it is it won't send the messages to your chat window which was typed by the remote side while you were offline. (It sends it as a chat log into the Chat folder though... better than nothing...)

We found IRC the most efficient and trustable solution with my collegues so far, but it will be the topic of another entry.

Sometimes the Gmail interface itself is doing some substantial transfers at the background which saturates the connection, so it's better not to open many of those windows.