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Comment by voltagex_ | Hacker News Reader

Have you tried to browse the Internet on 2 megabit (best case) recently?

I do it pretty regularly. It's fine with a good content blocker, almost unusable without.

2 megabit is far lower than the best case for 3G HSDPA...

My parents live in rural Australia and their internet is 3G through a basic roof-mounted 850 MHz whip antenna getting a signal from some 15-20 km away, and they get a solid 6 MBit down, which is fine even for a decent-quality YouTube stream. Their main hurdle is the $8-10/GB that Telstra charges for the privilege.

That's good to hear - I think that's HSPA instead of original 3G. VividWireless wasn't an option?

The original 3G was 384 kbps... I doubt there are many places left on the planet still running that.

VividWireless looks like it only exists near cities, no coverage at my parent's address. None of the other main wireless providers (Optus, Vodafone) have signals anywhere near them, only Telstra NextG. They're even lucky when it comes to geography since they live on the right side of the valley... 800m in the other direction and they'd be in radio shadow. Even Telstra's own coverage map doesn't actually show coverage for them!

Last time I was there I read that Telstra was building a 700 MHz LTE network. If that replaced the 850 MHz HSPA network and reached them they could get some really great speeds.

2mbit is useable. It's slow but usable. Have you tried browsing with 56kbit after your data plan ran out? You'll have to wait minutes for sites to load and some don't load at all. For comparison 2 mbit is enough to live stream basically anything in LD if you pipe it through rabb.it first.

I use 1mb down every time I go to my parents house. It's not fast but it gets the job done.

HSPA+ is far, far from 2 Mbit.

Also, I'm sure the Facebook app works wonderfully with 2 Mbit, because they've spent years optimising for that.

Whatsapp/other messengers, FB and Twitter, maybe - but next to no other app is optimized for low internet speeds. Hell, ordinary games will regularly go into and above 200+MB territory for download... and in contrast to your computer where you can have DVDs with games sent to you by post, no such luck for smartphone apps.

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