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Comment by initramfs | Hacker News Reader

It's all of the above, integrated with a maximum latency for each tier level. Not a new protocol, but adopting the best of the best, like QUIC over UDP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC#Client_support Apple is a vertically integrated company, so the idea is that a mobile carrier/ISP could help ensure the middle trunk from server to client arrive in a timely fashion. Often that involves good QoS and limiting streaming to 720p. But there are a lot of other things that can be done to limit slow page loading. For example, I tried loading Reuters on a slow data connection, and it took much longer than BBC. https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

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I still don't get it. I came here to make much the same comment as you are replying to.

Unless you mean that your parallel internet is just the regular internet but with the protocols you personally like? So its more of a web thing where you promote sites that aren't bloated?

> so the idea is that a mobile carrier/ISP could help ensure the middle trunk from server to client arrive in a timely fashion.

I don't know that demanding someone like Hurricane Electric to use QoS is going to have a desirable outcome. Is this more a government thing? Forcing T1s to use QoS? My gut tells me that ignoring QoS markers saves them an appreciable amount of CPU, and also lets them act more neutrally.

How do I as a carrier service your "Thinnernet". How "Parallel" is the infrastructure? Do I have to buy capacity or can we peer? Do I have to maintain a separate routing table? Do you use BGP or something else? Are you planning to buy L2 international capacity to "Replace" T1's? What do you do if a carrier starts sending everything as EF? Is there a PoC node or network operating anywhere?

I just don't see anything in here except for broad references to undersea cables and UX.

the references are metaphorical. App developers like Facebook have Lite versions of their Messenger. No actualy physical sectoring or allocation needs to take place. What it's emphazing is that App developers have a liteweight mode. Google got rid of their HTML page version when checking GMail on the web in 2024. Their app still works relatively fast, but on a 128KBps connection, loading a single page on the Javascript only desktop browser version is really, really slow. Like 5-10 minutes slow. I wrote more in another response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48453653

The Symbian phones from Nokia and Sony were ultra-efficient. Not everyone remembers that era, but they were real time operating systems that ensured tasks got completed in a certain time, including user-prompted inputs. It's not a technical limitation of a company or service, but a lot of their revenue might depend on a minimum number of ads or cookies and web analytic trackers being visible on a page. Often in the numbers of 30 or 100+. With all those elements removed from a site, the service might not bring in much revenue. So it's not really an issue of technical capability, but a business model.

Personal blogs don't typically have this issue, as they can be hosted on a small home server, or a remote server, and aren't concerned as much with ads. I can't suggest how the internet should be run, and the article does acknowledge the benefits of a decentralized web. But predictability of content delivery ETA from internet speeds is not an impossible thing to optimize towards, even if uptime isn't above 99%. What is somewhat novel in this proposal is standardizing a subset of typical website activities, like checking news, weather and mail, and getting a more predictable completion time for certain tasks, but factoring in known latencies from wireless providers (as pings will not be as low as a wired connection), and lowering the average latency for the round trip.

On a much larger scale of interactions- but again the web is so wide and varied, that most of those things cannot be standardized, nor should. But kind of like measuring the commute time of an expressway in a city, or subway trips to a grocery. Things that people need and won't optimize more with an Uber. Hence measuring static over HTML is an easy test, and more sophisticated web services can and do have those kinds of benchmarks. But integrating the device, ISP, and server in a way where certain activities can get slightly preferential treatment like ordering and picking up a prescription at a pharmacy, setting appointments with a doctor, would not get deprioritized bandwidth compared to someone streaming something in 4k, and maybe temporarily limiting that other user's bandwidth to 1440p for maybe a few minutes.

So I do think a tiny bit of QoS or speed throttling is needed only in exceptional cases, but for the most part, the typical user wouldn't notice or necessarily need that level of speed adjustment. Most of the optimization would take place at the software, website, and OS level.

I would make that more clear. Maybe use "web" instead of internet. And drop all the references to physical infra.

I agree most of the issue is on the "web" and not the physical infrastructure, although there is an internet outside the "world wide web" too: https://yesterweb.org/zine/issue-05/08/

"The internet and the web are not one and the same. The web is simply one protocol of the internet. You see the "https://" at the beginning of the url bar? That's the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or as it's more commonly known, The World Wide Web."

I sometimes mention the two because multiple protocols are part of the Transport layer. But then again, relying on one too much may be part of the problem, hence the emphasis on examining all the layers and protocols, like UDP.

But you don't really examine the other layers, just talk about them. You aren't proposing alternatives.

Honestly if you cut through everything that's brought up and left dangling, whats left is Website and App efficiency, and a very sizable percentage of apps are just wrapped websites.

I just did a ctrl+f on the page and couldn't find a reference to UDP.

That's because I wrote about QUIC & UDP in my previous post yesterday.

https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/5-things-to-lighten-d...

https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-road-to-quic/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC#Client_support

https://nordvpn.com/blog/what-is-quic-protocol/

https://www.fastvue.co/fastvue/blog/googles-quic-protocols-s...

My writing is tangential as it is, so I try to keep the layers separate in different analyses.

Java ME, Azul & OS (Symbian): https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/how-about-new-java-ba...

Edit: One thing I didn't include in the article was file sharing protocols, because of security vulunerabilities. I recall IPFS had some known issues, but others have tried to use similar protocols:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_synchroniza... There are at least two that use QUIC, such as Kubo/IPFS and Syncthing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncthing

Do they work faster than the regular web? Well, torrents can download faster. But I do not know how much the web depends on it or needs it. I know Microsoft and Steam servers allow downloading games and updates from other PCs, including ones outside a local network. Why they offer it (for Windows system files), is beyond me. Maybe some areas (public networks) share an unsecure wifi network more often and do not own a separate router for trusted internet access. I guess the files are encrypted enough that there is a checksum that can determine if the files are not tampered?

>That's because I wrote about QUIC & UDP in my previous post yesterday.

>My writing is tangential as it is, so I try to keep the layers separate in different analyses.

I must admit I am still having a hard time following you.

>Why they offer it (for Windows system files), is beyond me.

Why should a household or office download windows update files more than once? Seems like a great idea.

>Do they work faster than the regular web? Well, torrents can download faster.

IPFS in my limited experience is slow but reliable. Torrents are slow in peer discovery but fast after that.

>I guess the files are encrypted enough that there is a checksum that can determine if the files are not tampered?

Digital signature also.

>I must admit I am still having a hard time following you.

You're not the first. A "sister" project I started in 2020 is hardware focused, and later on, I determined that a lightweight suite for internet would complement the offline stack: https://ei2030.github.io/FemtoTX/#about

One could say it's a "solution in search of a problem", but game development also is an incubator:

https://www.thediff.co/archive/a-solution-in-search-of-a-pro...

There are other Jobs inspired R&D groups out there- a notable one is Ink & Switch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s8OA08ggbM They use an aircraft carrier vs. bicycle comparison, as Steve Jobs preferred the bike metaphor as an extension of user capabilities.

Someone here mentioned WAP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol which I completely forgot about, and AJAX:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming) These techniques/protocols helped make the Symbian internet experience fast, before other smartphones had many solutions.

>Why should a household or office download windows update files more than once? Seems like a great idea.

I agree with you on that. I also use it to share files and updates on my own network, often when transferring Steam games from one PC to another. I meant for non private networks (like internet cafes) is where I thought there might be a security issue. https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/windows-is-using-your-in... I do not really know whether it's secure enough, but I'm going to leave that to the experts.

I also think they could be useful on internet nodes that are at the end of a network, like an an ad-hoc wifi chain, such as Guifi: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/10/how-to-build-a-low...

>IPFS in my limited experience is slow but reliable. Torrents are slow in peer discovery but fast after that.

You have more experience than I do on IPFS, so I will take your word for it.

>Digital signature also.

Did not know that, but I've heard of them.

HTTP isn't the WWW. Back when browsers supported FTP and Gopher, you could deliver the exact same HTML, for the exact same experience, over either protocol.

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