Engineering for Slow Internet

Or they could be making a joke about how quickly trends shift in IT. It's like how people joke (or at least used to joke) that you'd get a dozen new JavaScript frameworks daily.

Exaggeration for comedic effect, in other words.

> a lot of the end-user impact is caused by web and app engineering which fails to take slow/intermittent links into consideration.

Technology today is developed by, and for, privileged people. Has been that way for a while. Ever since you had to upgrade your computer in order to read the news, there has been a slow, steady slog of increasing resource use and conspicuous consumption.

I remember using the 9600 baud modem to get online and do the most basic network transactions. It felt blazing fast, because it was just some lines of text being sent. I remember the 2.5KBps modem, allowing me to stream pictures and text in a new World Wide Web. I remember the 5KBps modem making it possible to download an entire movie! (It took 4 days, and you had to find special software to multiplex and resume cancelled downloads, because a fax on the dialup line killed the connection) I remember movies growing to the size of CDROMs, and later DVDROMs, so those who could afford these newer devices could fit the newer movies, and those who couldn't afford them, didn't. I remember the insane jump from 5KBps to 1.5Mbps, when the future arrived. Spending days torrenting hundreds of songs to impress the cool kids at school, burning them CDs, movies, compiling whole libraries of media [hey, 15 year olds can't afford retail prices!].

I remember when my poor friends couldn't use the brand new ride-sharing services Uber and Lyft because you had to have an expensive new smartphone to hail them. They'd instead have to call and then pay for a full fare taxi, assuming one would stop for them in the poor neighborhood, or wait an hour and a half to catch the bus. I remember when I had to finally ditch my gaming laptop, with the world-class video card you could've done crypto mining on, because opening more than 5 browser tabs would churn the CPU and hard-drive, max out the RAM, and crash the browser. I remember having to upgrade my operating system, because it could no longer run a new enough browser, that was now required to load most web pages. I remember buying smartphone after smartphone after smartphone - not because the previous one stopped working, but because more apps required more cpu and more memory and more storage. I remember trying to download and run a chat app on my local machine, and running out of memory, because the chat app had an embedded web browser. I remember running out of my data cap on my cell phone because some app decided it wanted to stream a load of data as if it was just unlimited. I remember running out of space on my smartphone because 70% of the space was being used just to store the Operating System files.

I'm not complaining, though. It's just how the world works. Humanity grows and consumes ever more resources. The people at the top demand a newer, better cake, and they get it; everyone else picks up the crumbs, until they too get something resembling cake. I sure ate my share. Lately I try to eat as little cake as possible. Doesn't change the world, but does make me feel better. Almost like the cake is a lie.

I had a similar experience as the author on a boat in the south pacific. Starlink was available but often wasn't used because of its high power usage (60+ watts). So we got local SIM cards instead which provided 4G internet in some locations and EDGE (2G) in others.

EDGE by itself isn't too bad on paper - you get a couple dozen kilobits per second. In reality, it was much worse. I ran into apps with short timeouts that would have worked just fine, if the authors had taken into account that loading can take minutes instead of milliseconds.

Low bandwith, high latency connections need to be part of the regular testing of software. For Linux, there's netem (https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/networking/netem) that will let you do this.

An issue that the anonymous blog author didn't have was metered connections. Doing OS or even app upgrades was pretty much out of the question for cost reasons. Luckily, every few weeks or so, we got to a location with an unmetered connection to perform such things. But we got very familiar with the various operating systems' ways to mark connections as metered/unmetered disable all automatic updates and save precious bandwidth.

As a web developer I actually resisted much faster internet for ages.

Until 2022 I had a rock-solid, never-failed 7 megabit/s-ish down, 640k up connection and I found it very easy to build sites that others describe as blazing fast.

This was slow really by the standards of much of the UK population even by 2015.

So all I had to do was make it fast for me.

A change of provider for practical reasons gave me an ADSL2+ connection that is ten times faster; still arguably slower than a lot of residential broadband in the UK but not so helpfully.

So now I test speed on mobile; even in the south east of England it is not that difficult to find poor mobile broadband. And when it’s poor, it’s poor in arguably more varied ways.