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Comment by lionkor | Hacker News Reader

This will be mega off-topic, but:

> throttled wifi every Wednesday to encourage empathy

As much as slow internet hampered my productivity, I used to have 15 mbit/s download speed until very recently (Germany is behind developing countries, of course, in terms of anything internet), it was good to experience.

Before that, when I was living in the countryside, I had 500 KB/s.

I know exactly how painful downloading 10, 100, 1000MB is, and I try to make everything I do load on GPRS with reasonable speed. My website, much like HN, loads on a 64 kbit/s mobile internet "connection".

Of course vodafone's website to recharge prepaid phones takes 20+ minutes (yes) to load on 64 kbit/s internet.

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It’s pretty much right on the money actually…

Our users in less digitally connected countries were insanely patient. The main problem was less the time than the cost, actually. The app required updates that were enormous. The cost to download them using the most common pay-as-you-go services in India represented a month of the local salary for day laborers… That information got hammered until developers learned to be more parsimonious.

I never heard anyone suggest that FAANG engineers had to forgo their monthly wage to download the test version of the app, but that probably would have triggered their empathy a little too much.

Am I just old if I as a developer think that 10mbit/s is plenty enough? I could probably do with 1mbit/s and still be about as productive as I am now.

Unless your coworkers find it it absolutely normal to design a system that needs pulling half of the Internet for every build, because they do have a gigabit connection.

Developers should use old hardware and slow connections, they would make much better apps.

As someone working in a company using old hardware and slow connections, hard disagree.

I would guess it's probably because the rest of the industry is happily wasting hardware and bandwidth because they can afford it.

If the whole industry had been stuck on hardware and bandwidth from 10 years ago, that most likely wouldn't be a problem.

You may not like it, but GP has a point: you are probably making better applications than you would if you had access to very fast hardware and massive bandwidth. Because that tends to invite bloat and you are now more or less forced to deal with it yourself rather than to foist it off on the users. So whatever hardware they have they may well find it runs faster than it does on your machine. Rather than the opposite.

You are not alone. The last time a home internet upgrade felt really significant to me was going from 2mbit to 8mbit. Everything else has been luxury. Though I'll be signing up for ~160 or ~1000 as soon as the new cables the street was recently dug up to put in place are connected, I like my luxuries!

I do still notice upstream improvements though. Both those old 2mbit and 8mbit connections were 256kbit up, and I currently have "up to 17mbit" which is [quick check of router logs] ~11mbit ATM - that can be limiting for backups or when wanting to share video or HQ photos with a large group. So the FTTP upgrade _might_ be justifiable as more than pure luxury.

DSL can usually do up to 250 mbit/s, no?

The standard FTTC options in the UK are nominally 40/10 and 80/20. I have the latter, which in reality works out as “up to 76mbit down, up to 17mbit up”. My router is currently synced at 56/11. Where G.FAST is available IIRC that is up to 250down/36up.

The engineers who invented DSL did Gbit/s speeds in the early 2000s. Unfortunately, real life 50 year old copper pairs aren't as fast as those in their lab...

Near Silicon Valley, we would get 256kbit theoretical.

you get used to high speed. I have recently had to download a 3Gb file on a 100mbit wifi. god, it took 5 minutes! that would take <1min on my 1gbit at home.

Low speed is ok, stability matters more imho.

There are old people in my village complaining that the 200 Mbps connection is "horrific" because there is something wrong with their equipment/setup so it cuts out often and leads to buffering on their IPTV.

Yeah; ISPs should be forced to advertise their 0.1th percentile speeds (aggregated over 60 second windows) as their topline upload and download numbers.

I once had a 100+ mbit comcast connection that couldn’t reliably do 2mbit in the evenings.

It is plenty, until you have to work with things like docker a lot, at which point downloading 1000 packages is normal.

Or if you have Steam, and every game wants to push 10-60 GB (!) updates every few weeks - this becomes a "leave the pc on for a few nights" ordeal. With 100 mbit/s, you give it 50mbit/s and an hour and everything is updated - all while you can keep working because you still have 50 mbit/s left.

Or if you have to quickly set up a Windows VM or other VM - not only is the download the longest process of setting it up, it will also happily update forever and hog the network.

Now assume you have 2-3 devices in the network, all doing backups, downloads, auto updates, and your 10-15 mbit/s connection is gone.

Good luck doing a backup, because residential 15 mbit/s download means 1.5mbit/s upload - you cant back up anything. Or stream your desktop. Or upload images in any reasonable amount of time.

You need ~25Mbps to stream 4k content.

I rarely steam more than 720p. Seems pointless for me personally, especially given I don't like wearing my glasses to watch TV.

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