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Isn't email usable over 2G and spotty networks too?

I find the VOIP calling on it laggy and delayed (listening to my wife's calls with her mum who hasn't realised that the default on her iPhone for calls is now WhatsApp as it has hijacked the default "phone" behaviour...)

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Have you ever actually tried using email via 2G? It's a mess! You can maybe send (via SMTP), but IMAP just doesn't work because it has way too much back-and-forth talking between your phone and the server, which sucks with 2G latencies, and because it's just verbose in general, which sucks with 2G speeds.

Well SMS and voice calls work fine. For the res, most of the time it can wait.

I used email in the early ISDN days on a shared network. Perhaps people's expectations of how much data (base64!) they want to shove in an email have changed since then.

I did once use 2G to VNC over SSH to a machine for work and that was painful, but usable. Colour depth had to be pretty low for it to work though.

We just love ever-increasing data usage, with about the same level of actual content (text).

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