What's the worst internet connection you've had?

Have you ever had internet that stops working every time it rains? That slows down if you put your foot too close to the router? That takes four hours to finish loading an Evangelion AMV? Maybe you've never had it quite that bad, but most of us have put up with a rubbish internet connection at some point, whether thanks to that one service provider who turned out to be useless, or that one house in a weird data-transfer dead zone.

Eventually you get used to installing games the night before you want to play them, and either endure the lag for the sake of your favorite online games, or give up on them altogether.

What's the worst internet connection you've had? And how did it affect your gaming?

Here are our answers, plus some from our forum.

Nat Clayton, News Writer: Before university, I spent a few months kicking around northern Europe doing volunteer jobs—one of which involved taking care of 60 sled dogs at an isolated kennel in the fjords of Norway. At the time, I was travelling with an American I knew from the (no, really) Super Monday Night Combat scene which, while already in its death throes, still had a pretty tight-knit community. We'd previously managed to get a few games in while working at a bamboo / Christmas tree farm in The Netherlands, but up here in the cold north we were fighting against ping rates that normalised at a healthy 1000ms. Trying to play a few SMNC customs with pals frequently saw us both teleporting across maps and falling to our deaths. An ill-considered attempt to take part in Guild Wars 2's Lost Shores event left us waiting minutes at a time for a single frame to update. Suffice to say, we pretty quickly abandoned any notion of filling the long nights with online games.

Sarah James, Guides Writer: I adored the original CoD: Black Ops and spent an obscene amount of time in the multiplayer, despite dealing with a ridiculously slow connection at the time. For the majority of the day, I could boast a whopping 3Mb download speed, but that was often throttled to around 500kb in the evenings. What's surprising is that it didn't actually make a huge amount of difference to my gaming. I mean, there were some evenings when Black Ops was unplayable, but most of the time my slow connection wasn't particularly noticeable—either that or I just got used to it. Installing games was a pain though. I think it took over a day to download WoW's Cataclysm expansion.

Robin Valentine, Print Editor: My internet connection at university was absolutely dreadful, which only served to worsen my already nocturnal sleep schedule, as it was way easier to download and play games when everyone else was asleep. I remember wanting to get games in of Bioshock 2's unreasonably good multiplayer mode, but between my dodgy connection and Games for Windows Live's wild instability, only one in 10 matches would have low enough lag for me to actually get a kill.

John Strike, Print Art Director: I played online with a dial-up 56k modem from 2000-2005 because I lived in the middle of nowhere, in a place where sheep outnumbered humans county-wide. Soldier of Fortune 2 and Operation Flashpoint were just about playable on UK servers, but my three-digit ping was so bad I even got booted out of a competitive clan match mid-game, because apparently I was warping around like Leonard Nimoy. People can teach you how to be a better player, and teach you how to play as part of a team, but nobody ever teaches you how to live with the shame of being a laggy assclown. My first day at university was a long time coming, then when it arrived I booted up the game only to realise multiplayer games weren't playable on the uni's proxy server. FFS.

Tim Clark, Brand Director: It was 2002 and my first ever E3—a time when high-speed internet was still in its relative infancy, and screenshots were still handed out on CDs. In a panic, I thought it was a good idea to send everything back to the UK via a 56k hotel connection, I think because the CMS didn't work remotely or something insane. I remember this vividly because 1) I had to plug the cable in via a socket in the lamp, 2) it took an entire night to send back half a dozen screenshots of Toby Gard's Galleon, and 3) on checkout I was presented with a $500+ bill because back then hotels were charging by the MB. My expenses got signed off, but let's just say that the web site in question is no longer with us. 

Jarred Walton, Tom's Hardware Senior Editor: Do pre-internet BBSes count? We bought a Commodore C-128 when they were basically brand new — double the memory of the C-64! This was back in 1985. As an add-in bonus, it included a 300 baud modem. I don’t even know how I found the information (11-year-old me was already a nerd), but I got the numbers for some bulletin board systems where you could play some basic text games. The thing that stands out most in my memory is screens of ASCII art appearing at about one 40-character line per second. One BBS had a welcome picture that was about 120 lines tall, even though most computer screens (TVs, really) back then were only 40×25 characters. So it required more than two minutes for the picture to scroll past, and I could only view about one fifth of it at a time. And yet, I still thought it was awesome! When we upgraded to a 2400 baud modem and the welcome page zipped by in about 15 seconds, I was blown away! Those were heady days.

Tyler Colp, Associate Editor: My crapp