VERY BANDWIDTH srsly though, what’s wrong with your parents’ internet that it’s so bad?

They live on a cliff in the middle of the woods where no cable place will touch them, so they have satellite internet, which is slow compared to cable on even the best of days, goes out all the time just because it didn’t like a passing cloud or the wind or the snow, and it has a 10 gig bandwidth cap. Just looking at Tumblr is a huge portion of this, but since it also affects uploading, it puts a real damper on me posting, attaching files to emails and putting things on my website.  It’s because it takes my internet so much more effort to open the new window (and even xkit’s little hover window, though that has helped) and load everything that I don’t tag everything when I reblog, I just alt click or cntl click or whatever it is to do it instantly, because most of the time, my reblogs fail and I have to try them all like four times. 

Annnnd then I get punished for the bandwidth that those three failed attempts used too. 

AND, since I frequently go over the limit given, especially because I didn’t know about it for a long time when I first had to move here, they slow down even our regular speed because they’ve now labeled us as ‘abusers’ of the bandwidth and for measures like 'signal quality assurance for everyone’, they cripple our connection.  Which just makes me try harder to get basic shit to work, thus abusing it more?

My work, my job hunting, paying my bills, my banking, 90% of my real friends, and 98% of my human contact comes from the internet. I pretty much HAVE to run it into the ground every month, or I’m going to end up cutting people and burning down buildings from isolation and frustration.

So because of things that either eat an enormous amount of bandwidth, or just plain don’t work because of the speed or strength of the signal, I can’t : afford to let most gif sets load, watch youtube or tumblr videos (though the youtube ones load better than the tumblr ones on days when I’m feeling particularly cavalier about the bandwidth limit), download big files, see most of the images on Tumblr, use Skype, play any games, stream anything/have Netflix/Amazon Prime, do much of anything online at the same time that I chat with people on gmail… and a bunch of other things I think I’ve forgotten that people can actually do.

After midnight, this all goes away and I can sort of use the internet freely without it affecting how much of the ten gigs I’m using, but most things still don’t load, I still can’t use Skype (or presumably Netflix, but it’s never something we’ve owned because if we can only use it spottily from midnight to 5AM, what’s the point in paying), and if there’s too much cloud cover or snow, it doesn’t matter what time it is.

This is why I livestream so infrequently.  It’s usually only when I think I can afford to not use the internet for a few days later in the month.

This internet also costs up to three times what cable does.

~*~FUN TIMES~*~