"It hurts when I move my arm." - "Don't move your arm then."

No one who uses dial-up wants to use dial-up.

It's still possible to be reasonably productive on dial-up if you're working in a screen or tmux session over ssh.

But the modern web is hopeless on slow connections. Some sites are pretty bad even at standard cable internet speeds. Site developers who work with gigabit fiber connections should try their pages at 10Mb or slower and 3G speeds out of courtesy to the real world.

With mosh instead of plain SSH, working with a crappy connection becomes pretty fluid.

The copper cable bringing ADSL to my house broke and it is prohibitively expensive to fix. I haven't had this bad Internet connectivity after 1999 but I can still work alright with mosh + tmux. Browsing the web isn't very nice, though.

10mb? I celebrate anything over 100KBps. This is anecdotal but in Uganda(Third word) most personal connections(MIFI/modem) are way slower than that

You mobile phone == dial up. Just less reliable and drops more packets.

At my home, mobile is much faster than my cable modem, although latency is variable.

I regularly pull 60/30 speeds on LTE. Broadband is 50/5. :)

In 1999 with a BTCellnet brick and WAP, I agree, but at no point in the almost 20 years since then, has it been as slow as dial up in any country I have visited. Maybe I am just lucky but it seems far fetched.

What do you define "fast"? Yes, most of the time you (the anectodal you) probably have LTE coverage everywhere, but that coverage is not universal even in high-tech places like Sillicon Valley and can vary wildly when just moving around for a bit.

As I said - if you'll actually look data in aggregate, you'll notice that people love to use their mobile devices for reading the web on commutes. Millions and millions of people devoting their morning/afternoon commute time to reading the internet on their mobile devices and mobile coverage in those conditions is nowhere close to "universal LTE without packet loss". A lot of cities (heck, even CalTrain in SV) have spotty commuter line coverage, especially when cells get loaded due to large amount of clients. Those people will then get crappy experience if you just assume everyone has LTE.

Is anectodal feeling data really how you design and optimize your software for end-users? :/

The throughput might be better than dial up but latency is worse, reliability can be awful (especially when you're between two cell base stations) and the connection can go down for a minute or more at any time.

In particular, the latency can make your browsing experience rival dial up.

Maybe you've never left the cities. I just took a 3000-4000 mile long train trip across the country. I'd estimate that I had cell phone coverage for less than 1% of the trip.

Well, on second thought let's say less than 5%. 1% would only be about an hour of that trip.

I ran in to plenty of 2g service in Germany and Belgium last year. Perhaps T Mobile just has horrible service, but I was frequently on slow 3g at best, especially west of Cologne. It made 4g/lte really nice when I found it, though :)

yes, 2g isn't dialup modem speed, but it isn't useful, either