I can adjust my workflow to do more remote heavy download jobs and ssh in to save bandwith. It seems workable in theory, but I'm a bit scared I will come to regret the move given my line of work. Maybe in a couple years new providers like starlink will improve my options.
Has anyone made a similar move? Am I irreparably spoiled by city living? What kind of practices / technology might I employ to ease the transition? Any advice?
Do we stream Netflix @ 4K ... no, but it is quite workable at low res, the 1Mbps upload is the most painful portion.
My cell data is faster (but 50GB\month cap) so I will use that for large uploads to save time, and also as a backup since we get frequent fixed wireless outages (esp. in summer since any storm seems to cause problems).
I also occasionally spin up EC2 instances to remote to when moving around data to avoid dragging it down locally (usually video). Works fine ... remote desktop to a Windows instance is perfectly usable.
Zoom/Google Meet/etc work OK ... not great, but perfect usuable and a lousy connection is a good excuse to turn off video sometimes!
I hold out hope for 21st century technology some day, but wouldn't switch the trade-off of being more in-town for a faster connection.
In your purchases contract for your home, add the requirement that high speed internet will service your work needs for video conferencing and such. We did so. Worked with the existing owner to ensure things were installed and tested while we were six states away.
I really only managed it (I run a little web agency) by having an office in a nearby town with great broadband, but there was a lot I found I could do from home by thinking a bit more carefully about what I needed when, whether I needed to download X at that partiular moment or if I could get it in the office and work on it later, and so on. The mindfulness around this was actually really good working practice, but definitely frustrating at times.
I think the cap would probably be [strangely] more frustrating to me. I could at least leave something downloading overnight without worrying about any limits.
I'd say: go for it. Living in the middle of the country is an incredible life experience.
For years I had 2mbps or worse dsl and I hated every minute. Some dev you can do just fine under those circumstances. I never got into the Docker habit because Docker makes me download a few gigabytes even if I want to make a few character change.