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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.

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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).

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

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