Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

(I'm referring to my bandwidth here, not site bandwidth.)

As you know, I'm on two-way satellite. That's my only option for reasonably priced ($180/month) highspeed access here. Which means that I get between 300 and 2000 kpbs downstream (which is fine), between 5 and 30 kbps upstream, and a second or so of latency (both of which are unacceptable). In addition, it regularly freezes for 5+ seconds, drops connections, and of course blacks out totally during heavy weather.

I called the various providers to see what it would cost me to just run in a dedicated line. Single ISDN costs $550 a month here, and a 256kbps line costs $2300 a month, and it ramps up from there depending on how much bandwidth you use. Getting this same speed connection in the city costs only about $50, or $500 if you want a 1mbps dedicated unmetered line.

I am unable to properly do development on my current connection. That's why the TOS software is lagging behind, and it's why I haven't fixed a couple of very obvious (and very easy to deal with) bugs. It's really driving me crazy. My work schedule is set up in a way that expects that all my peripheral tasks operate at maximum efficiency, so I'm putting in three hours of work to get half an hour of work done and am falling hopelessly behind.

This leaves me with four options as I see it:

1. Retire from computers and stop running/maintaining IAM and BME. BME could be scaled back a little, but IAM would have to be shut down. This option is unacceptable, so don't worry.
2. Set up a city office and commute. I know the way I am, and I know that if I did this, the work would become miserable and I would find any excuse to not do it any more.
3. Bite the bullet and run the two thousand dollar a month lines into a country home.
4. Move back to the city (which at this point, selfishly, I really don't want to do) and go back to working like crazy with the full support structures I need to do so.

I don't particularly like any of these options. I really don't want to move back at this point, but unless I'm overlooking something totally obvious, I don't see that I have much of a choice. So I think I'm going to take the next three or four years, work like a mercenary, and try and squirrel away as much as I can and take it from there. I have some commercial projects on the side that I can probably generate a few million off of if I play things right, and then I can just walk away (and by that point, IAM will be fully self sufficient so there'd be no fears there).