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

@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

@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

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