Stop whatever you're doing & appreciate that when the iPhone 3G came out, a website loading in only 20 seconds was considered a remarkable achievement.
@BasicAppleGuy 48sec over EDGE is something that the iPhone 3G could do, but was never achieved ever again. EDGE is basically No Service
@w EDGE was actually quite good! I remember travelling to Kyiv with friends and they've had EDGE there, in Moscow we didn't — only regular GPRS, even if some base stations supported EDGE they themselves used slow connection, so full EDGE speeds were never achieved. And I was impressed by it — I could browse Deviant Art from my laptop connected via mobile phone. I had thought that we would never need more bandwidth on mobile TBH.
@BasicAppleGuy
@m0xee @BasicAppleGuy my uncle worked for an Austrian telco and we always had unlimited data SIM cards from him. It was perfect for our travelling. We didn’t mind EDGE. I still cannot believe how bad it has aged, not because of the tech, but because of the data hungry services of today.
@w I have recently found an old Sony-Ericsson GPRS/EDGE PCMCIA modem in the storage room, I have an old laptop with PCMCIA slot and a SIM card with unlimited, albeit slow, data plan. Would be nice to get it working, but I'm not even sure it would be possible as some carriers don't support 2G at all nowadays — I know for a fact that you can put your SIM-card in old phone and quite literally get no service. Some carriers here still do and I hope mine would work 😁
@BasicAppleGuy
@m0xee @BasicAppleGuy You inspired me to look up old pictures. And look what I found. IBM Thinkpad + HSDPA PCMCIA modem used by me in 2006
@m0xee @BasicAppleGuy Yeah I see your point. We had a small house in the Austrian Alps where only GPRS and EDGE was available, we always tried to get EDGE as even 360p YouTube was possible. Nowadays you cannot even send a WhatsApp text message via EDGE
@w Ha-ha-ha, yeah, that's right, at the time I didn't even think watching videos would be possible, but when the first iPhone came out it wasn't considered unthinkable, it even had an app for YouTube and having only 2G connection was considered the device's shortcoming almost universally.
I still mostly prefer just text and images — pretty old-fashioned in this regard, so now I don't get the 5G hype 😂
@BasicAppleGuy
@m0xee @BasicAppleGuy tbf I have 5G unlimited on my current phone plan, but (in my daily usage) I cannot tell the difference between 4G and 5G. When you perform a speedtest you see the 600-900MBit/s, which is impressive, but on a phone I don't see any real world usage currently. Maybe someday we say: 4G is unusable, how could we have ever used it, but I doubt it.
@w Exactly! Even flagship phones of today are limited to 1 Tb storage so where do we put all the data? The only usage scenario I can think of is this VR stuff — so you can receive a lot of data, process it and immediately discard it. Because even with videos 6" screens make higher resolutions kinda pointless, but with VR goggles — who knows.
@BasicAppleGuy
@w 3G didn't even exist at the time so no, even regular GPRS wasn't considered no service — people have been paying money to have it.
When 3G appeared I didn't get all the hype because it wasn't day or night difference and then I realized that together with base stations getting replaced with 3G ones, their uplink connection got upgraded too, so most (especially non tech-savvy people) were comparing regular GPRS to 3G, they never had the chance to try what EDGE had offered.
@BasicAppleGuy