Ask HN: How do you deal with bad internet while WFH?

1 point

6 years ago

I live in the Seattle area, and unfortunately, this means my home internet has been getting increasingly worse over the past couple of weeks as our neighborhood node has maxed out its capacity. This is already confirmed by our ISP (Comcast) and me to be an issue on their end and not something at our home. They've been unwilling to give me any kind of ETA on when this might be fixed. Only one other ISP serves our neighborhood and it's not feasible to change to them at the moment.

Throughout the working day, I'm stuck at 20-60% packet loss, very low speeds, and high latency. To illustrate, here are two PingPlotter graphs covering roughly the last 20 minutes (red bars are packet loss, y axis is latency):

https://i.imgur.com/HoFRx43.png

https://i.imgur.com/w6BoOO5.png

It looks like that throughout the day, from around 8am to 11pm. Sadly, I'm not able to change my schedule to work midnight hours instead.

I can't stay connected to calls of any kind, can barely use our remote machines, constantly disconnect from anything that streams data real-time, am much less productive on dev work, and generally get upset with my internet countless times per day.

I'm really at a loss here. I'm sure I can't be the only person with really bad internet lately - what are some ways to improve your experience while on terrible internet?

3 comments