The Digital Age and Bad Internet

It has been a struggle for me these past couple of months, oh yes it has been. Having the global pandemic is horrible enough, but imagine having bad Internet on top of that? Yes, it's more horrible than you think. So you're stuck inside the house and you want to binge on your favorite streaming services but you have a data limit... The horror. It's definitely something you would wish upon your worst enemy. So you may have deducted that I have moved to a remote area, definitely leaning heavily towards the countryside and the Internet options that I can choose from are severely limited. The speed, strangely, is insanely fast. As a matter of fact, it is doubled when it comes to download from where I was from, which was a dense metropolitan area. It's quite counter-intuitive really, having super fast download coupled with a data cap. Alanis Morissette would have sung about that if Ironic was written today. Being a person with obsessive compulsive disorder, it has not been fun at all to keep checking my bandwidth consumption multiple times a day. Then there's the upload speed, which is just 3% of the download speed. It's pretty disgusting really. I had to severely reduce the quality of my twitch.tv broadcasts. Oh how I miss my old Internet.

What are the benefits of country living you ask? Well, you get bad Internet and a lovely morning sky.

For a gamer who favors the industry's progression towards digital distribution, it's a devastating scenario. Modern games are big. Like 10+ GB big. Larger titles averaged around 50 GB per download. To put things in perspective, the recently released Marvel's Avengers has a recommended requirement of 110 GB space. Then there are the patches. Oh the constant patches. 10 GB worth of patches a day, especially for someone like me who has a lot of digital games downloaded locally, is very typical. Of course these things were never a problem before. But they are now. I have started to delay patches and to selectively download only the games that I know I will be actively playing. I now have to wait until the end of the month to see if I have enough bandwidth to download my new games - my desire to get them hasn't slowed down even though I am not able to try them out immediately anymore like I did before.

One of my favorite games gets a new expansion! Oh wait... 61.4 GB patch?! There goes my bandwidth.

The fact that there is nothing I can do about this situation is probably the most frustrating part. If I ended up staying here for a longer period of time, my only hope is that Google Fiber will make its way to my area because it is already available in a city just an hour away from me. In the meantime, I have to make do with this crappy connection, regardless of the impact. Internet availability, access, and dependability were privileges that I apparently have taken for granted. I never thought that I would ever encounter this issue. Life is so very unpredictable. It is best to remember that.