Broadband speed requirement

[EdHarrison]

We are thinking of relocation to somewhere rural with very poor broadband speed, is there a sensible lowest speed requirement please to operate SD18?

[NormanRouxel]

SellerDeck (as Actinic) has been around since well before broadband existed. In the Actinic V3 days (circa 2000) most users were on dial-up connections and would have been lucky to get 56Kbps. That's 1/1000 of the speed of a typical broadband connection today. So the software was designed from the start to work on slow connections. Only changed files get uploaded and the download requirements for receiving orders are not onerous. And updating the site is a hands-off operation so you can do something else while it runs.

It's unlikely that slow broadband would be anywhere near the 56Kbps that SD could work with in the past. There are some FTP timeouts that may need tweaking but there are settings for that.

A more likely problem would your limited bandwidth getting hogged by the large number of updates that Windows and utility programs require. Worsened if you have more than one computer online.

I spent many years too far from the exchange and got around 0.5Mbps ADSL on a good day. I didn't dare complain as BT might have declared my location as invalid for ADSL and reverted me to dial-up.

[EdHarrison]

Thank you Norman, the quoted speed is just 3mb for downloading. I am looking at starlink which it seems may be available soon at the location, hopefully before we commit!
It is not terribly far from Castle Douglas but far enough to be very limited for broadband.

[brucet]

What Norman says is correct, Ed; but be aware that in those early days most sites would have been significantly smaller and less complex than I think yours is. Also upload speeds are often significantly slower than download speeds. We have made improvements to the upload over the years and everything should still work fine, but you will have to be very patient!

[EdHarrison]

Thanks Bruce, hopefully just short term until we get Mr Musk's starlink.

Thanks Ed