Re:5G Just Got Weird
by cromwellian on Monday August 10, 2020 @05:38PM
(#24114301)
Mobile Safari wasn't the problem, EDGE was. Yes, YouTube was shipped with the 2g iPhone, but it was unusable without WiFi. YouTube over edge is 144p potato vision with frequent buffering. Perhaps your tolerance for this is a lot higher than most consumers, but latency studies show people abhor it.
>clicking links being agonizing is either fiction or hyperbole.
Web 1.0 over EDGE is agonizing in latency. Without Javascript, every action that isn't a #anchor in the same page becomes a round trip. If your radio has gone to sleep, it takes even longer. And I was being charitable giving you EDGE, in 2007, many people were still on GPRS.
It's absolutely self evident that faster networks enable entirely new applications, just like increased memory beyond the 640k limit enabled new apps.
I went through just about every family of PDA and smartphone before the iPhone came out. Their web browsing universally sucked. The iPhone was a huge leap beyond other mobile browsers. The whole idea of clicking links being agonizing is either fiction or hyperbole.
It's funny you claim YouTube and Facebook would be terrible on EDGE when both services had mobile apps in the days of EDGE, YouTube even shipped on the iPhone. That isn't to say they aren't better served by higher bandwidth cellular service but they existed and functioned in the past.
High bandwidth connections are expected today and plenty of services would be unworkable without them. At the same time many web services are downright wasteful in their design and implementation.
Increased end-user bandwidth has just been eaten up by lazier or stupider designs and implementations. I fully expect these trends to continue as 5G rolls out. No one will actually do anything interesting because sites will load twice the ads (in 4K) and quadruple the size of their JavaScript bundles.