The American Midwest: Traveling where the cloud can’t follow

Every year, my dad’s relatives get together for a family reunion. I love visiting with my family, but it comes with one major downside: the location. You see, my dad’s family all live in rural Ohio and West Virginia — where the cloud goes to die. Not only is cell coverage spotty, but residential internet access isn’t much better. Speeds are generally abhorrent, and you’re lucky if you can maintain a connection for an entire day in some parts of town. Against my better judgement, I decided to try to stream all of my entertainment during my most recent trip. Here’s how it went down.
The trip to Ohio is relatively painless, and I had a strong LTE connection for most of my time spent on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It wasn’t until I left the major highways in West Virginia that cell coverage became a real problem. As you can see from Verizon’s official coverage map (below), large swaths of West Virginia and Ohio are white — meaning no coverage. In some cases, there wasn’t even enough signal for simple text messages to send properly. Trying to stream video or audio over a connection like that is a fool’s errand.
After a few failed attempts in the car, I decided to wait until I got settled into the hotel before I started testing my streaming services in earnest.

A failure to communicate

Now, hotels aren’t exactly known for having the world’s most reliable internet connections, but I figured it was my best shot since it was in a city. My family lives about 30 minutes from the hotel, and it’s nothing but farm land and mountains out there. In other words, this was my chance. I connected my tablet, smartphone, and Vita to the hotel WiFi, and I started testing the connection. It seems that the average download speed was a little bit less than 1Mbps, and the upload speed was an abysmal 123Kbps. Even worse, the ping to the closest SpeedTest.net server was 100ms, so the round trip to my FiOS connection 300 miles away in Delaware was even worse. At that point, I knew for sure that any sort of fast-paced game would be impossible to control.

To start my night of frustration off right, I attempted to connect to my PS4 over Remote Play. I opened the app, hit connect, and waited patiently for about a minute. It searched the local network first, and then checked with Sony’s servers to find the address of any paired PS4. It found my console, and began the process of connecting, but it bombed out after checking the “connection environment.” I couldn’t even get it to the main menu. The Vita just refused to finish the connection process — likely due to the bandwidth constraints.

I switched my Vita over to a Verizon MiFi with a slightly faster connection, but it was still largely unplayable. Sure, the latency was bad, but the severe artifacting made reading some of the in-game text nigh-on impossible. After about a minute of running around in Watch Dogs, that connection dropped as well. Compared to my experience with the strong LTE connection in my home state, this was a complete failure.