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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

To be fair when you are put on the 128kbps penalty box with the cell provider they also de-prioritize your traffic to the very very bottom of the queue so it's almost impossible to even get the 128kbps, and if the network is busy at all you often get nothing.

but you are correct that modern web frequently leaves low bandwidth high latency users out in the cold, but there are a few holdouts. Craigslist is still pretty usable for example. Hackernews is quite bandwidth friendly. Email is always an option. It's not all doom and gloom for the soda straw crowd.

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This was rural though, with the cell tower serving a small town, population 600, and folks on the highway and in the nearby backcountry. As far as we could tell it really was 128kbps. But definitely not enough for the modern (then - this is already 7-8 years ago) web.

We ran out the (then) measly data allotment of the day (500MB) on purpose on the last day of the billing period to try this.

I am on a real "unlimited" 128kbps plan on my phone. I use Firefox and ublock, so a lot of bloat is avoided. The bank app with its simple screens loads with much difficulty. Of course, it's a bank. Most sites load, just give it time. I give up on graphics mostly. YouTube works admirably well. But I agree it is a tad too slow for today. I regularly spend over 1GB a day as I play YouTube with the screen off.

> YouTube works admirably well.

This is what really kills me. I spent a lot of time in 2020 on a 4G connection throttled to 384 Kbps. Video calls? Fine (once you gave it a few seconds to notice the poor throughput and readjust its target bitrate). Most of the web? Not fine. Crazy reversal from the dial-up days when pushing even an audio call over the connection was difficult, and real-time video was a pipe dream that sunk more than one overly-enthusiastic would-be media streaming companies.

> Email is always an option

Provided you have Outlook or Thunderbird or whatever set up on your computer. That's beyond most grandmothers, who are likely logging into Yahoo or MSN or something.

Ya man, my father (a grandfather) moved here from Poland, not speaking the language with $200, bought a house within 3 years in California, had a successful career in construction management building amazing buildings you might currently be sitting in.... How could he ever figure out Outlook, that takes real concentration and determination reserved only for no name state school cs grads under 40!

The point is mindset. Someone willing to move not just across countries but continents will have it far easier to deal with computers and new technology in general than someone "set in their ways".

Unfortunately, our economic / labor system mostly does not reward innovation at all, which leads to many people burning out mentally and not pursuing change anywhere because they perceive that they invest time and mental effort, but run against walls of bureaucracy, intra-corporate fiefdom fights and a lack of money. And that mindset transfers to outside the workplace as well.

Grandmothers have been computing for long enough to know what an email client is. It is the first thing we setup on my grandma's intel 486 computer (at a time we were all using pentium II and above) when she got dial up.

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