WiFi at a stop is as easy as putting up a few wireless routers, it's a bit more complex than at home but the same general idea. Wifi inside the trains involves much more work, and to get them to ALSO be seamless across the entire setup - even harder. Easily 10x or 100x the cost. It's sad, because the Internet shouldn't be that bad when the network drops all the time; it should just be slower as it waits to send good…
I think they just put a wire in the tunnel.
Yes, that's the best way which is often used. A "leaky cable" aka "leaky feeder", to be particular.
Also wonder how many savings are still possible with a more efficient HTML/CSS/JS binary representation. Text is low tech and all but it still hurts to waste so many octets for such a relatively low amount of possible symbols. Applies to all formal languages actually. 2^(8x20x10^6) ~= 2x10^48164799 is such a ridiculously large space...
The generalisation of this concept is what I like call the "kilobyte" rule. A typical web page of text on a screen is about a kilobyte. Sure, you can pack more in with fine print, and obviously additional data is required to represent the styling, but the actual text is about 1 kb. If you've sent 20 MB, then that is 20,000x more data than what was displayed on the screen. Worse still, an uncompressed 4K still image i…
Soo.. there should be a standardized web API for page content. And suddenly... gopher (with embedded media/widgets).
LOL 8kbps. Damn. That takes me back. I built the first version of one of the world's largest music streaming sites on a 9.6kbps connection. I was working from home (we had no offices yet) and my cable Internet got cut off. My only back up was a serial cable to a 2G Nokia 9000i. I had to re-encode a chunk of the music catalog at 8kbps so I could test it from home before I pushed the code to production. Psychoacoustic…
Nokia 9000i, so you had to work on CSD (which is usually billed per-minute, like dial-up), not even GPRS. How much did that cost you? :P BTW, an interesting thing is that some/most carriers allow you to use CSD/HSCSD over 3G these days, and you can establish data CSD connection between two phone numbers, yielding essentially a dedicated L2 pipe which isn't routed over internet. Can have much lower latency and jitter…
God, the cost was probably horrid, but I was connecting in, setting tasks running and logging out. This was late 1999 in the UK, so per-minute prices were high. Also, these were Windows servers, so I had to sluggishly RDP into them, no nice low-bandwidth terminals.
Amen to this. And give them a mobile cell plan with 1GB of data per month. I've seen some web sites with 250MB payloads on the home page due to ads and pre-loading videos. I work with parolees who get free government cell phones and then burn through the 3GB/mo of data within three days. Then they can't apply for jobs, get bus times, rent a bike, top up their subway card, get directions.
Having an adblocker (firefox mobile works with uBlock origin) and completely deactivate loading of images and videos can get you quite far with limited connection.
You're 100% right. uBlock Origin can reduce page weight by an astronomical amount.
A fascinating article and I need to revisit this when I have more time. So, all I'd say now is that there's way too much emphasis on GUI. Also, check out some of the web sites on https://1mb.club - it's amazing what can be achieved in less than 1Mb of HTML ...
Mosh and NNCP will help a lot, but you need some good sysadmin to set NNCP as the mail MUA/MTA backend to spool everything efficiently. NNCP it's an expert level skill, but your data will be sent over very unreliable channels: https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/Use-cases.html Also, relying on propietary OS'es is not recommended. Apple and iOS are disasters to work on remote, isolated places. No wonder no one uses Apple in…
Well, statistically average end-user internet connection in Europe is much faster than in the US. Maybe outside some places like most of western Germany, but these are an exception. Europe has really good bandwidth speeds, overall.
I absolutely agree with the rest, though, including the part saying any "serious" software will have such features (and better support in general), and I second the examples you gave.
As I was reading this I realised that everything here had already been solved - by torrents.
Everything is split into chunks. Downloads and uploads happen whenever connections can happen. If someone local has a copy, they can seed it to you without you needing an external connection. You can have a cache server that downloads important stuff for everyone.
IETF draft proposal to extend HTTP for efficient state synchronization, which could improve UX on slow networks, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40480016 The Braid Protocol allows multiple synchronization algorithms to interoperate over a common network protocol, which any synchronizer's network messages can be translated into.. The current Braid specification extends HTTP with two dimensions of synchronization:…
This sounds suspiciously like Matrix. Does is required buy-in from user agents or will it benefit existing browsers once implemented?
Braid is backwards-compatible with today's web, works in today's browsers, and is easy to add to existing web applications.. You can use Braid features in Chrome with the Braid-Chrome extension.
I assume it was considered, but I don’t see it mentioned: Would it be a terrible idea to use a cloud computer and Remote Desktop/VNC to it? Your slow internet only needs to stream the compressed pixels to your thin client.
A lot of this resonates. I'm not in Antartica, I'm in Beijing, but still struggle with the internet. Being behind the great firewall means using creative approaches. VPNs only sometimes work, and each leaves a signature that the firewall's hueristics and ML can eventually catch onto. Even state-mandated ones are 'gently' limited at times of political sensitivity. It all ends up meaning that, even if I get a connectio…
I lived in Shoreditch for 7 years and most of my flats had almost 3G internet speeds. The last one had windows that incidentally acted like a faraday cage. I always test my projects with throttled bandwidth, largely because (just like with a11y) following good practices results in better UX for all users, not just those with poor connectivity. Edit: Another often missed opportunity is building SPAs as offline-first.