In my experience, browsers limit speeds in a way that's kind of nice and stable. You tell them to stick to 100kbps and they'll have 100kbps. Packet loss, jitter

In my experience, browsers limit speeds in a way that's kind of nice and stable. You tell them to stick to 100kbps and they'll have 100kbps. Packet loss, jitter, it's all a single number, and rather stable. It's like a 250kbps fiber optic connection that just happens to be very long. In my experience, real life slow internet isn't like that. Packet loss numbers jump around, jitter switches second by second, speeds vary wildly and packets arrive out of order more than in order. Plus, with sattelites, the local router sends fake TCP acknowledgements to hide the slow data transfer, so the browser thinks it's connected while the traffic is still half a second away. There are software tools to limit connectivity in a more realistic way, often using VMs, but they're not used as often as the nice browser speed limiter.