Funny, I just went through a similar experience and had to tether off a Verizon connection for almost two weeks.
I certainly felt the pain of a slow connection too and felt frustrated at how badly this affected the experience on so many sites.
Here’s an idea: web developers should test their sites on the slowest connection speed still commonly available (ie 3G) and make sure the experience is still acceptable. I know that webpagetest [1] allows you to do this and the results are illuminating.