The American Midwest: Traveling where the cloud can’t follow

Every year, my dad’s relatives get together for a family reunion. I love visiting with my family, but it comes with one major downside: the location. You see, my dad’s family all live in rural Ohio and West Virginia — where the cloud goes to die. Not only is cell coverage spotty, but residential internet access isn’t much better. Speeds are generally abhorrent, and you’re lucky if you can maintain a connection for an entire day in some parts of town. Against my better judgement, I decided to try to stream all of my entertainment during my most recent trip. Here’s how it went down.

  The trip to Ohio is relatively painless, and I had a strong LTE connection for most of my time spent on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It wasn’t until I left the major highways in West Virginia that cell coverage became a real problem. As you can see from Verizon’s official coverage map (below), large swaths of West Virginia and Ohio are white — meaning no coverage. In some cases, there wasn’t even enough signal for simple text messages to send properly. Trying to stream video or audio over a connection like that is a fool’s errand.

After a few failed attempts in the car, I decided to wait until I got settled into the hotel before I started testing my streaming services in earnest.

 

A failure to communicate

Now, hotels aren’t exactly known for having the world’s most reliable internet connections, but I figured it was my best shot since it was in a city. My family lives about 30 minutes from the hotel, and it’s nothing but farm land and mountains out there. In other words, this was my chance. I connected my tablet, smartphone, and Vita to the hotel WiFi, and I started testing the connection. It seems that the average download speed was a little bit less than 1Mbps, and the upload speed was an abysmal 123Kbps. Even worse, the ping to the closest SpeedTest.net server was 100ms, so the round trip to my FiOS connection 300 miles away in Delaware was even worse. At that point, I knew for sure that any sort of fast-paced game would be impossible to control.



To start my night of frustration off right, I attempted to connect to my PS4 over Remote Play. I opened the app, hit connect, and waited patiently for about a minute. It searched the local network first, and then checked with Sony’s servers to find the address of any paired PS4. It found my console, and began the process of connecting, but it bombed out after checking the “connection environment.” I couldn’t even get it to the main menu. The Vita just refused to finish the connection process — likely due to the bandwidth constraints.

 

I switched my Vita over to a Verizon MiFi with a slightly faster connection, but it was still largely unplayable. Sure, the latency was bad, but the severe artifacting made reading some of the in-game text nigh-on impossible. After about a minute of running around in Watch Dogs, that connection dropped as well. Compared to my experience with the strong LTE connection in my home state, this was a complete failure.

See no evil, hear no evil

After that, I tried to stream music over Spotify and Plex. Across both internet connections, the music streaming worked, but not as well as I’d like. The music would play, but hiccups were frequent. Buffering in the middle of your favorite jam is never a good time.

Video, however, was an even worse experience. My Plex server was configured to stream 720p video out at 3Mbps, but I knew that wasn’t going to fly here. The hotel WiFi was too slow for that, so I cranked it down to a 720Kbps video feed. I selected an episode of Good Eats, and waited for it to load. After about a minute, it started playing, but it stopped to buffer a few minutes later. I let it spin, watched another few minutes, and then it needed to buffer again. I couldn’t take it.

 
I bailed out of my TV show, and went into the Plex settings. The next option down was 320Kbps — an extremely low bitrate. I selected it, and tried watching my cooking show again. This time it played without stopping to buffer, but it was a blurry mess. Just like the streaming experience on the Vita, any text on the screen was just too mangled to read. It did work, but the experience was completely miserable.

The next day, I drove a half-hour to get to the reunion. Up on the mountain, the situation was even worse. My signal was so bad that I couldn’t load a web page, and other internet options were nearly as useless. Most of my family members there simply don’t have an internet connection, and the one that does only has access over satellite. As someone who suffered with a satellite internet connection for years, I can assure you that it’s a miserable way to surf the web. Even if you disregard the slow speeds and ridiculous latency, the oppressive bandwidth caps make streaming any substantial amount of video completely impossible.

Cloud-free Ohio

Once you get outside of the densely populated areas here in the US, the utility of the cloud completely falls apart. I went into this expecting nothing to work, and that’s what I got. Luckily, I get to go home. I get to stream all day long, and download whatever I want whenever I want. Unfortunately, my family members in rural Ohio aren’t so lucky. There’s no Netflix, Hulu, or PS Now in their lives. With the severe usage limits in place, even basic cloud storage, like Dropbox or Google Drive, is out of the question for some of them.
Extremetech