by Jason Snell
Slow Internet at the South Pole
I loved the Brr blog, which was written by an IT expert during a year in Antarctica. The author is home now, but here’s a surprise bonus post, full of information about how slow the Internet is in Antarctica and why modern software is terrible at working over slow connections:
Downloads are possible at the South Pole, but they are subject to unique constraints. The biggest constraint is the lack of 24×7 Internet. While I was there, I knew we would lose Internet access at a certain time!
It’s a frustrating reality: with most apps that do their own downloads, we were powerless to do anything about this known break in connectivity. We just had to sit there and watch it fail, and often watch all our progress be lost.
The details in this post are fantastic, though they won’t be surprising to anyone who has tried to use conventional apps and websites on a very slow satellite link. Apple’s method of doing macOS updates comes in for some justified criticism, as does the caching server built into macOS. I was surprised at just how many ways Apple’s processes failed under the strain of the slow connections at the South Pole.