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33.6Kbps is not practical for much on the modern Internet in 2026. As mentioned in a sibling comment, Starlink (even in standby mode) would be much better. lite.cnn.com would load in about 10 seconds which is pretty good, but there's not much else like it left anymore.
What's amazing is how great the Internet in the 1990s managed to be despite these limitations. Just like with RAM and disk space, developers back then had to be very mindful of bandwidth - today's devs (and agents) have the luxury of paying much less attention to that.
Simple weather radar image on Compuserve took about a minute to load. Billing was by the minute too!
What’s more amazing is with 10000x the communication speed and about 1000x the CPU, 1/20th the latency, things now are only about 30x faster…
Today, that damn weather page should have been fully loaded and rendered before one even realized they pressed the enter key.
20+ mb is the weight of all the javascript javascripting, ultimately to arrange and display an html page.
What can happen, instead: I can dream.
In this dream, the process of loading a web page identifies the viewing platform well-enough and the server delivers content that is shaped for it, so it can be downloaded quickly and displayed simply by the end-user device. It's not one-size-fits-all at all, or even one-size-fits-most: It's a pile of of simplistic HTML and maybe some minimal javascript and CSS that is meant for whatever the user is using right now.
In this way, the same layout jiggering, varnicating, and transfabulation is done as it is done today, but the work of doing so principally happens on the server instead of the client.
Also in this dream, I can hear people saying "But that's a can of worms!", and they're right. It's a damned mess -- but it's a mess either way. This just moves the mess from the client to the server.
I can also hear shouts of "But there will be hundreds or even thousands of layout paths!" And all I can think is: If there's a thousand unique device types hitting a given dynamic page, and that scales poorly with the server side doing the work, then that's a problem for the systems guys to direct instead of the web guys.
Which is fine: The web guys hacking away however they want is how we got into this mess of 20 megabyte Javascript downloads just-to-view-a-web-page to begin with. They've quite broadly proven that they're shit at this kind of work, and in my ideal world they'd be relieved of that duty.
(And yeah, to be sure: After I wake from this dream I'm still going to go outside and yell at the clouds, just as I do every day.)
A couple of news sites have a low-bandwidth version: https://text.npr.org
Theoretically, such a service could allow you to "browse" even via SMS.
I mean, it’s a bit ridiculous to have to resort to that, but the situation itself is ridiculous.
Unless you've tuned your system for it, dial-up modem speeds are functionally equivalent to "no connection at all".
It's brutal, even with modern Internet, when people develop apps with the assumption of the Internet connection always having decent latency and bandwidth.