We need to fix those places. Not permanently anchor the rest of the world to a decade ago.
For one, it's extremely fragile. There's only so much redundency that can be built into this infrastructure and I'd rather not see society completely grind to a halt because internet got knocked out.
Secondly, I don't even want to be connected to high speed internet every second of my life. Some people in tech find this hard to believe, but there are benefits to unplugging at times that many people appreciate.
Lastly, I shudder to think what privacy would look like in this world. Not having any escape from surveillance would lead to a grim society.
Then don't. Disconnect your device. The rest of us shouldn't do without something because you don't like it.
I'm in a team developing software for people in areas with rubbish internet. It's a bit above my pay grade to fix infrastructure problems in foreign lands. It's probably more cost effective to let the software deal with it gracefully.
And in my case.. the infrastructure was fine, but a sheep literally chewed through it. Do we ban sheep? Granted he should have been better fence... but the point is shit happens and help out in the country can take weeks to materialize.
But you guys agree anyway: but handling "gracefully" slow speeds you dont anchor the fast and still provide to the slow. The keyword is gracefully.
And yes, we probably should be doing that. But in the meanwhile those places still exist, and will continue to exist for quite some time.
I was responding to a similar attitude. We can pretend caring about shit internet is important for software makers. Sometimes it is. Usually it isn't. Simply saying "it should be different" and then pretending that it is, is equally silly.
We are firmly in "wishing for a better world" territory. Others wish that other people cater to their shitty connections. I feel that that would anchor us to shitty connections, so I wish for fewer shitty connections.
It's all pipedreams anyway.
One example that gets me is that Google Maps broke the ability to save points on the map without internet. It had worked fine for years since it could easily be saved locally, but now the regression has been around for a year+ and they clearly don't care. If you live your life in a modern city it's no biggie, but it cripples some of the main functionality for everyone who lives or travels to areas with poor connectivity.