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Comment by magila | Hacker News Reader

It's a minor nit, unrelated to the article's main point, but I found it strange that the author seems to think you need a high-speed internet connection to order wine across state lines. I'm guessing this comes from ISP marketing which portrays broadband as an absolute essential for all internet activities.

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Depends on your definition of "high-speed." I still think of that as meaning anything faster than dialup. The front page of wine.com is 4MB, which would take ten minutes to load over a 56k modem, so in that sense it doesn't seem wrong.

Of course the meaning of high-speed is always going to be relative. The author makes it sound like ordering wine over the internet wasn't possible until broadband become available. I don't know if such sites existed, but a wine retailer certainly could have setup a storefront on the internet back in 1995.

Yes, wine.com was one of the the early ecommerce sites. Started in 1995, but may not have been transacting until a few years later.

Or even earlier. Catalog sales and mail order have been around for a long time. 1-800 numbers for orders by phone started in the 60s and became standard in the 80s. The internet didn't invent remote ordering.

Do any still exist? They weren’t implying you always needed a high speed connection.

That's yet another whole potential article about lobbying and regulation in America, labeling what "high-speed Internet" is until it's watered down to DSL or so at 4 mbps. At least a few years ago they redefined it to 25 mbps.

They're only wasteful because it doesn't matter. Wine.com would not take long to load over a median connection, even if the median connection was 56k or worse. It's a far cry from uses that inherently require high speeds.

If by "not long" you mean 10 minutes under ideal conditions?

If the median connection was 56k, I guarantee you wine.com would not take 10 minutes to load over 56k. It would be closer to 10 seconds.

Wine.com does not need broadband to be widespread. Widespread broadband lets it be a little bit prettier, and the devs are too lazy to care about exceptionally slow connections. Without widespread broadband, wine.com would be the same, but with smaller pictures. Without widespread broadband, twitch would not exist, and youtube would be crippled. Those are the sites it enables.

Images are optional downloads, it could be a 400MB image and it would take the same 0.00 seconds on a 14.4 modem. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/981640

Also, blind people still use the web. So, that feature is not going away any time soon.

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