internet

Internet Speeds in the Middle of Nowhere

I live in rural Georgia. Comcast doesn’t come out here. Verizon has no services besides cellular out this way. A T & T has a service but it is really cellular in nature. Earthlink, same thing.

We got Starlink RV last year and it has been pretty good. The biggest download speeds I’ve seen were somewhere around 50 mps. (megabytes per second).

This morning as I was playing around with other things, I saw this in the Clean My Mac app.

Screenshot 2023 10 06 at 6 37 12 AM

Of course, my first thought is “no way!”. So, I run a test on Speedtest.net…

Screenshot 2023 10 06 at 6 38 33 AM

So in conclusion, I have no idea why it is suddenly so much faster unless they added satellites and a lot of them or they’ve added a ground station near me.

Leaning towards the latter if the speeds continue. I’ll update the post throughout the day.

Update#1 (0951) – Speeds have decreased.
Screenshot 2023 10 06 at 9 50 13 AM

Update#2 (1322) – Speeds are way down but could be down all over the place.
Screenshot 2023 10 06 at 1 22 06 PM

Update#3 (1446) – Speeds are back up again.
Screenshot 2023 10 06 at 2 46 17 PM

Update#4 (1855) – Last update. Speed went down again.
Screenshot 2023 10 06 at 6 54 28 PM

Internet Speed in the Sticks

I understand that most people have ok internet speeds but for me and my wife, it can be a daily struggle.

We live in the middle of nowhere. Comcast doesn’t come out this far and the only things we have are LTE grade cellular and satellite.

HughesNet satellites are too high up to be useful. The latency makes them almost unusable.

Enter Starlink. My wife bought this for us a while ago and it has been a game changer for us.

The only reason I am posting about it is because I just ran a speedtest and got this result.

Screenshot 2023 07 30 at 7 16 17 AM

This is very unusual for us. We’re usually lucky to get 10Mb down.

Happy Sunday!

Facebook Disappeared

Understanding How Facebook Disappeared from the Internet

Great article about how Facebook went dark for several hours yesterday.

“Facebook can’t be down, can it?”, we thought, for a second.

Today at 1651 UTC, we opened an internal incident entitled “Facebook DNS lookup returning SERVFAIL” because we were worried that something was wrong with our DNS resolver 1.1.1.1. But as we were about to post on our public status page we realized something else more serious was going on.

Social media quickly burst into flames, reporting what our engineers rapidly confirmed too. Facebook and its affiliated services WhatsApp and Instagram were, in fact, all down. Their DNS names stopped resolving, and their infrastructure IPs were unreachable. It was as if someone had “pulled the cables” from their data centers all at once and disconnected them from the Internet.

How’s that even possible?