Mobile experience at 128 Kbps, 256 Kbps, 512 Kbps, and 1.25 Mbps?

Kramy wrote: ↑ There are web apps that can check any website and tell you how large it is. A lot of sites these days have homepages as large as 3MB. At 50KB/sec (512kbit) that's about a minute to load. You can speed that up by using compression and only accessing mobile versions of sites. Lots of mobile sites are 100KB or less. Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi - I think they all have compression. I have found Opera works quite well even in marginal signal areas, on low speed LTE. (Ex: Public Mobile - 3mbit)

I think for video, you do need a bit more speed unless you limit yourself to 480p.

Messaging will be fine on even the lowest speed - unless you start sending huge photos back and forth. 128kbit is ~16KB/sec - that's like 3000-4000 average English language words per second. Toss some emoticons in and you're still not maxing out that throttled connection. Even if the app is using horribly bloated uncompression schemes, it's still got a lot of speed for that task. Email is the same - unless there's large attachments, 16KB/sec is enough.

Dave98 wrote: ↑ I could be wrong but I don't think the unlimited data applies to Lucky's $15 plan.

It's only mentioned in the $15 data only plan and the $25 and up plans

ddot98 wrote: ↑ I've always thought of the "unlimited slow" speeds at the end of your normal data bucket as more of a safety net. If you run out of the main bucket a couple days before the end of the month, you don't have to worry about being stuck without any access when you need to look something up. Having said that, slow connections will always work for "time shifted" scenarios (ie messaging, web browsing) if you're patient. Also keep in mind that your average modern webpage has a huge amount of crap built in. Filter some of that out, and browsing on a slow connection isn't quite as bad.

If you're willing to experiment, you can actually test out your questions. In the Chrome desktop developer tools, you can do simulations for alternate devices and also simulate throttled connections. Lets try an example. In a fresh install of Vivaldi (in a virtual machine), I simulated a mobile device with a custom network throttling profile of 128kb/s up, 128kb/s down and 25ms latency. (Hopefully a reasonable approximation of a Lucky connection.)

I loaded up the RFD homepage. Page loaded in about 3 minutes with 2.2MB transferred. (Hard to tell when it exactly finished loading as the ads keep pulling new data.) A little on the painful side.

Let's try it again with UBlock origin installed with its default settings. Page loaded in 41.81 seconds with 586kB transferred. Better.

Now lets create some custom filters. We'll kill images, 3rd party javascript, objects and fonts. Page loaded in 6.52 seconds with 57.3kB transferred. Much better. And subjectively, browsing around RFD wasn't that bad in this configuration.

Long story short, browsing for fairly static content with a slow connection on a browser that supports content blocking in very doable. (If you're willing to do a bit of work and make a few sacrifices.)

I wrote up a little blurb on mobile browsers in a previous thread. I'll shamelessly link it here for reference.

sexyj wrote: ↑ 128kbps is double of fastest speed on dial up days @ 56k, it's not useable on today's web

even with a forum like RFD, the minimal per page load is 1MB+.

At 512kbps, it "could" be useable but expect lags. Basically double of the time of what you experienced in 1.25Mbps