It would be really nice if those designing technology systems for the web would spend some time using the stuff they design on lower speed connections. There's

It would be really nice if those designing technology systems for the web would spend some time using the stuff they design on lower speed connections. There's no excuse these days - the Chrome web inspector lets you simulate network profiles if you want (though I wish they'd add "Rural WISP" options by default - say, 5/1 with some random latency spikes and a few dropped packets every now and then). I've been on a 25/3 (that mostly delivers 20/2 during the day, and "a connection" during the evening that... varies wildly) for about six years now, and I've been working 100% remotely that entire time. It means I have to think about some of my transfers and let them run for longer periods, but I've had no trouble doing video conferences and other things on this connection. I just have to pay attention to what I'm doing, and I might need to cancel or pause a transfer if I'm jumping on a video call. If it works for the meeting, I tend to use a cell phone for audio - most video conference bridges support this method. But we've also generally designed our life around the fact that we're not on super fast connections. We cache content locally (I tend to rip DVDs to the server so I don't have to deal with the physical disks), and while streaming works if we let it, I'm certainly not streaming high bitrate 4k content... but we also don't have a large enough TV that it really matters at our viewing distances. Also tend to cache other stuff - I'm running a local Ubuntu repo, because I have a lot of VMs that do various things, and sucking down updates over the LAN is far faster than running over the WISP. None of us play extensive computer games, and while I do game a bit, it's things like Minecraft or Kerbal Space Program that are offline/local, or at least not latency sensitive. I hear lots of complaints about how bad consoles with online-only games are on slow connections (especially the update game), so we just don't have one. We game quite a bit, but it's board games, tabletop games, etc. If stuff were designed for "something slower than gigabit," it would certainly improve the experience on slower connections, but literally making a living on something a lot of people barely even consider broadband, I've not found it to be an actual issue if you just work within the limits. Now, the usual answer for this is "But Starlink!" - and I have it. It's a secondary connection, because it's not actually usable as a primary connection for much beyond casual web browsing and file downloads these days. I know it's a beta, and I'm certainly putting traffic through it to help with their testing, but it's just not a good primary connection if you have alternatives yet. The bandwidth is fine, the latency is good, and the rest of it is just annoying. It's really prone to breaking long running connections (CGNAT and it seems like my public IP changes halfway often), so SSH tunnels and VPNs get broken constantly. They tolerate some packet loss just fine (just pause for a moment and then resume when the packets start again), but over Starlink, they get reliably broken. I've not poked around enough to figure out why. The bandwidth is also hugely variable (both upload and download). Sure, you see 300-400Mbit at peaks, and I often see north of 200Mbit... briefly. Then it slows down, drops to less than 10Mbit, pauses, goes back up, etc. It doesn't show in random speed tests as much, but if you scp or rsync a big set of files over, you can watch the speed rise and fall. I can't imagine bandwidth estimation algorithms are able to make much sense of this for things like video calls, and the quality of video calls on Starlink isn't great yet. It's also prone to plenty of "micro-drops" where it simply stops passing traffic for 5-10 seconds. Not normally a huge deal, but very, very disruptive for video calls. I still use my 25/3 for any sort of video conferencing, because it's slower, but more consistent. (One may safely assume I'm pretty rural)