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Comment by Auracle | Hacker News Reader

My wife works remotely as an accountant. We have Starlink as it’s the best internet available in our area, and we used to have an unlimited hotspot as well for other reasons. We’re very close to a cell tower.

Her company requires her to have some form of wired internet. So, instead of paying for the Starlink or the hotspot they’re paying for 25/1 mbps DSL that never actually reaches those speeds. The Starlink and hotspot both are/were closer to 200/10.

We never use the DSL, apart from the very occasional heavy thunderstorm.

Sometimes what companies think you require doesn’t match up with reality.

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They're paying for coverage in that thunderstorm; that's the business expense to ensure connectivity for their remote widget.

Why would your wifes employer compensate for a tool that doesn't meet their needs?

It's so slow it's basically unusable for her. I don't know the full details of how her job works as far as uploads/downloads go but it seems that even with something 15x faster than that DSL connection she's often waiting a minute or two, and I know there have been times where she's been uploading something for 30+ minutes. Having those instances 10-15x slower would make it so she literally can't do her job.

The hotspot worked just fine in thunderstorms and was significantly faster. I even had our router set up to automatically bump over to the hotspot for the rare occasions the Starlink went down.

I mean your wife could probably explain her employer that the company is paying for a connection that doesn't provide enough bandwidth to do the job and that the money would be better spent on the Starlink connection.

Of course they might just conclude that your remote location isn't compatible with the demands of the job though.

Oh no, she tried. We would have much rather kept the Starlink + hotspot combination, but since they would pay for neither (and required the 'land line') we dropped the hotspot.

Except when the thunderstorm is very heavy and then it doesn't work, according to your post.

So which is it?

'Basically Unusable' is not un-tenable or non-working. The only fulcrum your wife has is if the people she reports finds her slow timing unacceptable due to the connection; use the provided work tools and make everyone feel the pain.

You're subsidizing their connection cost for free.

I think there's been one thunderstorm like that in the day since she's started remote work two or three years ago, and the connection dropped for 10 minutes. We usually get storms like that in the evening, and that happens maybe 5 times a year.

I guarantee the DSL has dropped way more than that. Before Starlink and the hotspot we had that's the service we used, and it was atrocious.

It's just an old policy in a very large company that's slow to update their policies.

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