Playing Elite Dangerous on a wireless laptop on a train!

Lightspeed

Lightspeed
Looks like those trains have improved enormously on that route since I last travelled it, swaying around in the old 'restaurant car' at 100 mph and wondering if it would hold together until the destination.

Yet the sandwiches haven't !!!! [woah]
 

Count

Count
Lightspeed said:
Looks like those trains have improved enormously on that route since I last travelled it, swaying around in the old 'restaurant car' at 100 mph and wondering if it would hold together until the destination.

Yet the sandwiches haven't !!!! [woah]
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We did have one heart stopping moment when he was just about to retrieve the scolding hot Earl Grey tea bag (I did ask for some Fujin Tea, to which he handed me a basket of Twinings herbals for me to look for myself. I didn't bother to ask for a Leather Egg as well) and I did hear a couple of winces from people watching, as it felt like we were suddenly cornering at Detroit (showing my age here), just as he lifted the swinging, dripping tea bag from the boiling cup of tea. All conversation in the car paused, and much to the relief of everyone, he quickly lowered the bag back into the into cup, and picked up a spatchula to use.

And if/when you do manage to spill a bit of the somehow hotter than boiling water it's all not contained for you in a paper bag. I had this accident on the journey down. The paper bag never made it past Car C, which got a couple of minutes of amusement to watch as I struggled with the boiling spillage and the quickly disappearing 'bag', just managing to bundle the dripping mess into one of the little bins, and only marginally scolding myself. Happily I didn't also have a Panini with molten cheese and hot fat dripping from it to carry as well that time.

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Windscreen Smudge

W
Good on ya.

How are data plans in the UK, just out of curiosity?

I'm currently on an involuntary hiatus from ED for the next month because downloading the last couple months of updates I've missed will put me at my limit.... 3 days into my current billing cycle..... Because I had to update some essential software to the tune of 10gb last night. This is thanks to living in the states, where because our multi-billion dollar telecom companies can't afford basic maintenance on the lines for the whopping 1.5mb DSL service they were extorting me for ludicrous amounts out here they dropped my account.

I'm just wondering if wireless data plans are as crippling for a main net connection in the EU as they are here, never paid much attention to what kinds of offers you guys get in that area.
 

Count

Count
Windscreen Smudge said:
Good on ya.

How are data plans in the UK, just out of curiosity?

I'm currently on an involuntary hiatus from ED for the next month because downloading the last couple months of updates I've missed will put me at my limit.... 3 days into my current billing cycle..... Because I had to update some essential software to the tune of 10gb last night. This is thanks to living in the states, where because our multi-billion dollar telecom companies can't afford basic maintenance on the lines for the whopping 1.5mb DSL service they were extorting me for ludicrous amounts out here they dropped my account.

I'm just wondering if wireless data plans are as crippling for a main net connection in the EU as they are here, never paid much attention to what kinds of offers you guys get in that area.
Click to expand...

Incidentally the wireless was provided by the train, it wasn't the laptop on a data connection.

Currently, this is a very big topic. We are stuck with one provider only where I live. We are massively over charged because of their monopoly position, and the service we get is shocking. People all over the city are constantly looking for alternatives. We're supposed to be on 4G, but we're still waiting for anything stable and competitive with the landline ISP 'service', which can fluctuate depending where you are in the city. A few years ago they introduced a Star Rating scheme, from 1 to 5. If you paid more you got 5 stars, the cheapest was 1 star. The basic service was identical, but they didn't have enough switches for peak times, so modem switches were prioritised by stars. So if you were on 1 or 2 stars, you wouldn't be able to connect between 6pm and 8pm peak times. THEN they introduced an 'UNLIMITED' monthly data plan, which turned out had a cap on and cost me over £300 when I went over my unlimited data limit. Currently I am paying £42 a month for landline internet and the best I can squeeze from it is about 12-14Mb. A friend less than half a mile away has currently got Gigabit Fibre Optic at £50 p/m. I phoned them and my street has not made it onto any planned schedules on the FO rollout.

There is some strange alternative, which uses a small dish and uses microwave I think, but I don't know much about that?

Other than that we are all desperately waiting for a cheap stable alternative to our current provider in this city, or they get around to the £50 Fibre Optic, whichever is first really!

Sore topic, currently.
 
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Windscreen Smudge

W
Count said:
Incidentally the wireless was provided by the train, it wasn't the laptop on a data connection.

Currently, this is a very big topic. We are stuck with one provider only where I live. We are massively over charged because of their monopoly position, and the service we get is shocking. People all over the city are constantly looking for alternatives. We're supposed to be on 4G, but we're still waiting for anything stable and competitive with the landline ISP 'service', which can fluctuate depending where you are in the city. A few years ago they introduced a Star Rating scheme, from 1 to 5. If you paid more you got 5 stars, the cheapest was 1 star. The basic service was identical, but they didn't have enough switches for peak times, so modem switches were prioritised by stars. So if you were on 1 or 2 stars, you wouldn't be able to connect between 6pm and 8pm. THEN they introduced an 'UNLIMITED' monthly data plan, which turned out had a cap on and cost me over £300 when I went over my unlimited data limit. Currently I am paying £42 a month for landline internet and the best I can squeeze from it is about 12-14Mb. A friend less than half a mile away has currently got Gigabit Fibre Optic at £50 p/m. I phoned them and my street has not made it onto any planned schedules on the FO rollout.

There is some strange alternative, which uses a small dish and uses microwave?

Other than that we are all desperately waiting for a cheap stable alternative to our current provider in this city, or they get around to the £50 Fibre Optic, whichever is first really!

Sore topic, currently.
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Holy giblets can I sympathize.

Here's some food for thought if you're friendly enough with your friend to work out a deal with him and willing to pay for a second FO connection to get set up at his address. I wouldn't go for the full gigabit because you'd have to pay out the nose for a wireless receiver capable of that, but I imagine they have a reasonable 250mbit or 500mbit plan that a decent receiver can handle.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/TP-Link-TL-ANT2424B-2-4GHz-Parabolic-Antenna/dp/B002EIF2OK/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1459891080&sr=8-3&keywords=directional+wifi+antenna

Hook that up to a halfway decent wifi router and you can shoot a signal to your house, assuming you have line of sight. Give your pal a few quid a month and a manly handshake for being a champ and helping you get out from under your current provider's thumb, and sleep a little more soundly knowing that you aren't giving your money to a bunch of unwashed blowholes of the flatulent variety.

I just did something similar because I'm also in a bad area for cell service, so my wifi hotspot is sitting in a waterproof pouch on my neighbor's porch a quarter of a mile away and I have a directional antenna in my window. I can get Verizon here, but their contracts are evil enough that I went through the extra hassle. My neighbor, who is still getting snookered by the DSL provider that dropped me, is mustering up the courage to do the same. He's afraid of the data limit though and I don't blame him. 14-18gb a month just isn't enough when software updates can run 30-40gb a month.

Edit: Just for reference. I went from 1.5mbit with a 150-200 ping that often got throttled to 30% of that and was unreliable in bad weather to 15mbit with a 50 ping that has high reliability, so despite the data limit I did get some very decent upgrades in that department.
 
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Siobhan

Siobhan
Count said:
Incidentally the wireless was provided by the train, it wasn't the laptop on a data connection.

Currently, this is a very big topic. We are stuck with one provider only where I live. We are massively over charged because of their monopoly position, and the service we get is shocking. People all over the city are constantly looking for alternatives. We're supposed to be on 4G, but we're still waiting for anything stable and competitive with the landline ISP 'service', which can fluctuate depending where you are in the city. A few years ago they introduced a Star Rating scheme, from 1 to 5. If you paid more you got 5 stars, the cheapest was 1 star. The basic service was identical, but they didn't have enough switches for peak times, so modem switches were prioritised by stars. So if you were on 1 or 2 stars, you wouldn't be able to connect between 6pm and 8pm peak times. THEN they introduced an 'UNLIMITED' monthly data plan, which turned out had a cap on and cost me over £300 when I went over my unlimited data limit. Currently I am paying £42 a month for landline internet and the best I can squeeze from it is about 12-14Mb. A friend less than half a mile away has currently got Gigabit Fibre Optic at £50 p/m. I phoned them and my street has not made it onto any planned schedules on the FO rollout.

There is some strange alternative, which uses a small dish and uses microwave I think, but I don't know much about that?

Other than that we are all desperately waiting for a cheap stable alternative to our current provider in this city, or they get around to the £50 Fibre Optic, whichever is first really!

Sore topic, currently.
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Sounds a lot like where I live... er...hmm.
 

Khuno

Khuno
Count said:
[. . .] There is some strange alternative, which uses a small dish and uses microwave I think, but I don't know much about that? [. . .]
Click to expand...

I use a small dish microwave system here in the rural US. It is A LOT better than the previous DSL we had, but wouldn't be my top choice. We get around 12mb/s with a mid-range plan.
 

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead
I regularly play ED on my laptop at work, in a Tesco delivery van! :D

I usually tether my laptop to my phone. Sometimes it's actually faster than my fibre optic connection at home!
 

BACKER #-4112

BACKER #-4112
Disappointed.
All that desk space and you didn't take a HOTAS?
Don't tell me you had no room in your bag, you can just hang that laptop off your keychain and pack the HOTAS in the bag...
+1
 
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