6 ms·

No, it's more than that. There was no YouTube in 2000. Web video for wired connections was shitty. MPEG-2 was the codec dujour. Progressive Networks/Real Networ

No, it's more than that. There was no YouTube in 2000. Web video for wired connections was shitty. MPEG-2 was the codec dujour. Progressive Networks/Real Networks was people's conception of online video. Netflix was shipping DVDs by snail mail. If the iPhone existed in 2000, there still couldn't have been a TikTok. AR glasses for example, could totally upend all of this and require 5G low latency, and fast accurate positioning. Yes, 5g when it arrives next year, won't change anything. However, 7 years from now, it may be the enabling platform for AR glasses the way 4g LTE was the enabling platform for smartphones. Really, how useful was a 2g (Edge) iPhone without a wifi connection?

giantrobot 6y ago
> Really, how useful was a 2g (Edge) iPhone without a wifi connection? Very. Lots of sites had mobile versions of pages by the iPhone's release. These were originally intended for Blazor and pocket IE but they worked fine for an iPhone on EDGE. I could do e-mail just fine on EDGE as well.
- cromwellian 6y ago
  Not for me. I've owned every smartphone and high end feature phone since the 90s. A Blackberry was still better than an iPhone + IMAP + EDGE in terms of subjective speed. Mobile websites sucked hard on the iPhone. (Don't even get me started on Pocket IE and the IPAQ). Quite literally my day job was Windows CE development, I was on the W3C XHTML/CSS/XForms committees, I worked on implementation of those specs on HW before it hit the market, none of these mobile web sites were very usable except for basic text information serving. Interactions (eg clicking links, submitting forms) were agonizing. I used to joke that slapping Gopher or a libcurses based apps on these phones would be superior (IMHO, the experience was inferior to an Amiga on a v34 modem dial to Unix) Mobile Web apps are not really functional at EDGE speeds. And certainly todays' media, which is rich with imagery, would be completely overwhelmed at EDGE/3g speeds, even if you remove the overhead of HTML and JS bundles. Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, all of these apps would be terrible on EDGE. The thing is, we are so used to high bandwidth now and its availability, we seldom realize how dependent we are on it until we lose it.
  - mycall 6y ago
    2G modem tethering to a laptop was usable. I did this all the time.
  - giantrobot 6y ago
    I wonder what product you were using labeled "iPhone". Mobile Safari was head and shoulders above other smartphone browsers. It handled mobile sites of the day without any issues in my experience. It was nothing like other mobile browsers. 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.
    - cromwellian 6y ago
      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.
tuatoru 6y ago
> AR glasses for example, could totally upend all of this and require 5G low latency 5G "low latency": I'm not impressed with "1-2 ms" first hop latency; 0.1 ms should be achievable by now, surely. AR over networks: Maybe. But I think having more compute out on the edge nodes is going to deliver more for us in the long term than faster comms. Every extra millisecond in the rendering pipeline decreases the usability of AR significantly.
- Androider 6y ago
  Carmack famously quipped that "I can send an IP packet to Europe faster than I can send a pixel to the screen" [1]. For VR and AR to break through, they're going to have to be in a form factor that resembles normal glasses, and at a much higher render quality (4K+) than anything we've got now. That's almost certainly going to require rendering remotely Stadia / Xbox Cloud style, with some minimal local processing. [1] https://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-faster-than-sending-a-pixel-to-the-screen https://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-fa....
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    I don’t know. As long as they can render in 4K the actual geometry can be fairly simple, so maybe my phone would be perfectly capable of that?
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    Well, or you could render on the phone and stream to the glasses. I don’t think even 5G is low latency enough for what you’re describing—not even close. Stadia works because it’s not VR, so they have some latency headroom. For good VR (Valve Index, etc), you get around 20ms for the entire rendering chain.
    - ethbro 6y ago
      Depending on bandwidth, you could probably stream an over-rendered viewport (e.g. 3D skybox) that allows for local-device-magnitude latency for critical functions (perspective change & location translation), while being backed by streaming servers (especially of the edge variety).
p1necone 6y ago
I don't think people were watching streaming video on 3g, especially not with the data caps of the time. The improvement from 2g to 3g (in my experience at least) was literally just being able to load web pages without waiting minutes for it to finish (which is a huge improvement of course).
- kalleboo 6y ago
  Yeah the original 3G (384kbps, before HSDPA) was just about enough to stream music flawlessly. The Swedish public radio broadcaster had 3GPP AAC audio streams and at the time the Swedish operators had all made those streams unmetered, and where I lived the 3G reception was actually better/more stable than FM stereo, so I'd listen to them all the time. This was before or at release of the iPhone, which couldn't do this.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Sprint had unlimited 3G around 2003 called SprintVision. They also offered a service where you could stream 10-15 live cable TV channels. By 2005, this phone (https://www.cnet.com/reviews/samsung-mm-a900-sprint-review/ https://www.cnet.com/reviews/samsung-mm-a900-sprint-review/) could play video at around 15-20fps. These are the services that Sprint offered over 3G on feature phones. https://www.sprint.com/cdma/assets/pdfs/services_guides/personalize_entertain/spcs_vision_ug.pdf https://www.sprint.com/cdma/assets/pdfs/services_guides/pers...
  - eclipxe 6y ago
    MobiTV!
    - scarface74 6y ago
      Thank You! I couldn’t remember the name. It came out in 2003. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobiTV https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobiTV On my first phone with Sprint Vision, it did 1 FPS. https://www.cnet.com/reviews/samsung-sph-a840-sprint-review/ https://www.cnet.com/reviews/samsung-sph-a840-sprint-review/
everdrive 6y ago
>Really, how useful was a 2g (Edge) iPhone without a wifi connection? On a webpage without 80mb of javascript, it's quite useful.
- cromwellian 6y ago
  At 135kbps, you're talking 18 seconds to load the average HTML webpage, which was 300k in 2007. My guess is, your memory of how speedy and useful Edge was, is like those fond nostalgia memories people had about how fast their FidoNet/WWIV BBSes loaded over 300/1200 baud.
  - everdrive 6y ago
    In those old days the text would load first, and then the images slowly. It wasn't so bad. I had below-average 56k dial-up until 2002. Getting 3.0 Kbps was a high point for me.
aabbcc1241 6y ago
4g makes Angular and React "acceptable" for webapp on smart phone that was built in PHP. 5g may makes Unity and Flutter "acceptable" for webapp on smart watch that was pre-installed.
randomdata 6y ago
> Really, how useful was a 2g (Edge) iPhone without a wifi connection? It was sufficient to do most things, even streaming online radio. The biggest downsides were that latency was high and the annoying speaker buzz problem. 3G was a big step up. I never felt like LTE came as much of an upgrade over 3G, from there user point of view, so I question it being the defining technology for smartphones.
- kalleboo 6y ago
  Yeah, the early LTE networks were not much faster than the mature HSDPA+ networks from the end user point of view. But it was certainly a necessary evolution to give the networks enough capacity to handle the ever-increasing data demands of users, 3G would not have held up for much longer.

giantrobot 6y ago

> Really, how useful was a 2g (Edge) iPhone without a wifi connection? Very. Lots of sites had mobile versions of pages by the iPhone's release. These were originally intended for Blazor and pocket IE but they worked fine for an iPhone on EDGE. I could do e-mail just fine on EDGE as well.

cromwellian 6y ago
Not for me. I've owned every smartphone and high end feature phone since the 90s. A Blackberry was still better than an iPhone + IMAP + EDGE in terms of subjective speed. Mobile websites sucked hard on the iPhone. (Don't even get me started on Pocket IE and the IPAQ). Quite literally my day job was Windows CE development, I was on the W3C XHTML/CSS/XForms committees, I worked on implementation of those specs on HW before it hit the market, none of these mobile web sites were very usable except for basic text information serving. Interactions (eg clicking links, submitting forms) were agonizing. I used to joke that slapping Gopher or a libcurses based apps on these phones would be superior (IMHO, the experience was inferior to an Amiga on a v34 modem dial to Unix) Mobile Web apps are not really functional at EDGE speeds. And certainly todays' media, which is rich with imagery, would be completely overwhelmed at EDGE/3g speeds, even if you remove the overhead of HTML and JS bundles. Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, all of these apps would be terrible on EDGE. The thing is, we are so used to high bandwidth now and its availability, we seldom realize how dependent we are on it until we lose it.
- mycall 6y ago
  2G modem tethering to a laptop was usable. I did this all the time.
- giantrobot 6y ago
  I wonder what product you were using labeled "iPhone". Mobile Safari was head and shoulders above other smartphone browsers. It handled mobile sites of the day without any issues in my experience. It was nothing like other mobile browsers. 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.
  - cromwellian 6y ago
    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.

tuatoru 6y ago

> AR glasses for example, could totally upend all of this and require 5G low latency 5G "low latency": I'm not impressed with "1-2 ms" first hop latency; 0.1 ms should be achievable by now, surely. AR over networks: Maybe. But I think having more compute out on the edge nodes is going to deliver more for us in the long term than faster comms. Every extra millisecond in the rendering pipeline decreases the usability of AR significantly.

Androider 6y ago
Carmack famously quipped that "I can send an IP packet to Europe faster than I can send a pixel to the screen" [1]. For VR and AR to break through, they're going to have to be in a form factor that resembles normal glasses, and at a much higher render quality (4K+) than anything we've got now. That's almost certainly going to require rendering remotely Stadia / Xbox Cloud style, with some minimal local processing. [1] https://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-faster-than-sending-a-pixel-to-the-screen https://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-fa....
- Aeolun 6y ago
  I don’t know. As long as they can render in 4K the actual geometry can be fairly simple, so maybe my phone would be perfectly capable of that?
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Well, or you could render on the phone and stream to the glasses. I don’t think even 5G is low latency enough for what you’re describing—not even close. Stadia works because it’s not VR, so they have some latency headroom. For good VR (Valve Index, etc), you get around 20ms for the entire rendering chain.
  - ethbro 6y ago
    Depending on bandwidth, you could probably stream an over-rendered viewport (e.g. 3D skybox) that allows for local-device-magnitude latency for critical functions (perspective change & location translation), while being backed by streaming servers (especially of the edge variety).

p1necone 6y ago

I don't think people were watching streaming video on 3g, especially not with the data caps of the time. The improvement from 2g to 3g (in my experience at least) was literally just being able to load web pages without waiting minutes for it to finish (which is a huge improvement of course).

kalleboo 6y ago
Yeah the original 3G (384kbps, before HSDPA) was just about enough to stream music flawlessly. The Swedish public radio broadcaster had 3GPP AAC audio streams and at the time the Swedish operators had all made those streams unmetered, and where I lived the 3G reception was actually better/more stable than FM stereo, so I'd listen to them all the time. This was before or at release of the iPhone, which couldn't do this.
scarface74 6y ago
Sprint had unlimited 3G around 2003 called SprintVision. They also offered a service where you could stream 10-15 live cable TV channels. By 2005, this phone (https://www.cnet.com/reviews/samsung-mm-a900-sprint-review/ https://www.cnet.com/reviews/samsung-mm-a900-sprint-review/) could play video at around 15-20fps. These are the services that Sprint offered over 3G on feature phones. https://www.sprint.com/cdma/assets/pdfs/services_guides/personalize_entertain/spcs_vision_ug.pdf https://www.sprint.com/cdma/assets/pdfs/services_guides/pers...
- eclipxe 6y ago
  MobiTV!
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Thank You! I couldn’t remember the name. It came out in 2003. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobiTV https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobiTV On my first phone with Sprint Vision, it did 1 FPS. https://www.cnet.com/reviews/samsung-sph-a840-sprint-review/ https://www.cnet.com/reviews/samsung-sph-a840-sprint-review/

everdrive 6y ago

>Really, how useful was a 2g (Edge) iPhone without a wifi connection? On a webpage without 80mb of javascript, it's quite useful.

cromwellian 6y ago
At 135kbps, you're talking 18 seconds to load the average HTML webpage, which was 300k in 2007. My guess is, your memory of how speedy and useful Edge was, is like those fond nostalgia memories people had about how fast their FidoNet/WWIV BBSes loaded over 300/1200 baud.
- everdrive 6y ago
  In those old days the text would load first, and then the images slowly. It wasn't so bad. I had below-average 56k dial-up until 2002. Getting 3.0 Kbps was a high point for me.

aabbcc1241 6y ago

4g makes Angular and React "acceptable" for webapp on smart phone that was built in PHP. 5g may makes Unity and Flutter "acceptable" for webapp on smart watch that was pre-installed.

randomdata 6y ago

> Really, how useful was a 2g (Edge) iPhone without a wifi connection? It was sufficient to do most things, even streaming online radio. The biggest downsides were that latency was high and the annoying speaker buzz problem. 3G was a big step up. I never felt like LTE came as much of an upgrade over 3G, from there user point of view, so I question it being the defining technology for smartphones.

kalleboo 6y ago
Yeah, the early LTE networks were not much faster than the mature HSDPA+ networks from the end user point of view. But it was certainly a necessary evolution to give the networks enough capacity to handle the ever-increasing data demands of users, 3G would not have held up for much longer.