400 round trips * 500ms latency is 3 min 20 seconds. This took 20 minutes to load 1 megabyte.
(Really, did anyone ever get the nominal 56k modem rate back in the day?)
Page "girth", the number of different parts of a page that need loading via separate requests, is often a more significant issue for performance, again particularly on mobile devices but this time because wireless connections tend to be less reliable and even a modest increase in dropped packets can really hit your effective page load time.
Combined with link delays, dropped packets, long round trip times and the like you get a much slower nominal bandwidth.
It's okay though, sometimes a bit of hyperbole does a better job of getting the story across.
And ofcourse, nowadays if i'm on a train my phone will often downgrade to gprs speeds, and it feels like i'm back on dialup having to wait a minute for a page to load.
I spent a month all over Brazil, and, while it was painful trying to work from some areas near Belem - it was either 80kbits+/second on GPRS or no connectivity whatsoever.
For a good couple of years visiting my parents in inland South Africa (just outside the major sprawl of the PWV), I was regularly seeing 1 to 2kbps speeds on dial up modem. South Africa only has one phone company, Telkom.
The price of copper affects the quality of the telephone lines. We live in an area that's quickly growing, but the availability of copper is low. So there's shared telephone lines, which creates noise, which slows down modem connections.
Yeah, they can string out more copper cables to work through the shared lines, but when those copper cables disappear as quickly as they are put up, it is very difficult to make progress. Copper theft in South Africa is big.
And the shared telephone lines are deemed acceptable because Telkom support it only for telephone calls, not modem connections. They are reluctant to fix things that are not broken.
So landlines are effectively useless in fast growing areas, there's not enough copper cable to go around to give people a decent clear line to a dial-up ISP, let alone broadband.
I've moved my parents over to mobile broadband now, with a Mifi device that appeared on the market last year, so those download speeds are hopefully a thing of the past.
Essentially, developing countries need to skip their subpar landlines and invest heavily in mobile broadband abilities. They can't afford the long term cost of replacing copper cables over and over and over.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/09/23/british-t...
Just off the top of my head, rural Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.
Solutions tried by people I know (all since 2005)
* Satalite radio (helps with downlink but uplink is still via modem) * Pay $700/mo for 1.5mb commercial T1 (1.5MBps). Took the ISP 3 days to do the line engineering from the CO. * Long distance point to point wifi (@2.4GHz ~1mile and 800Mhz 10+ miles) * HAM radio packet networking. Slow but fun * Running 1/2 mile+ of Ethernet cable (with inline repeaters) through the woods and hoping no one messes with them * Combinationa of the above.
Hisghspeed Internet access in rural/hilly areas is a major challange. We pay a few dollars every month on our phone bills as a special state tax to fund the ISPs to provide it. Have for years. still a problem.
At two minutes, there are people out there with 6.6 kilobit links connecting to youtube?
I suspect there might be a bit of hyperbole in this article as well, because, even if there were people connecting on ultra slow links, the average latency of those connections is likely to be be wiped out by the tens of millions of broadband links.