Maybe the problem Isn’t the page size. Maybe the problem is the artificial bandwidth scarcity being created by US cell providers.
They have no way to increase sales due to basically complete market saturation, so instead they find new ways to soak their existing customer base.
People always seem to forget how horrible things were when at&t was about to acquire T-Mobile. Had they not been forced to hand TM all that spectrum we’d still be paying $100/mo for 2GB of hard capped data.
> Maybe the problem is the artificial bandwidth scarcity being created by US cell providers.
This. When I (in France) can €15.99 a month for unlimited calls and texts to phones in France, the US, Canada, China (plus unlimited calls to fixed lines in 100 other countries, too) and a 100GB 4G data plan included, too, it seems crazy that US carriers charge so much. Sure, there are infrastrcuture differences in serving a country of more than 300 million spread out over a landmass so big rather than a small, more densely populated country like France, but it still seems out of control.
I've lived in both Japan and Canada, not the US. All the reasonable-priced plans in both countries had limits in the single digit GBs. Japan was better in that data over the limit just got capped at a very low speed, rather than paying extra. But in all three cases, a single page load unexpectedly using 65mB is outside reasonable.
Not sure about the GP but they might not be in the US. There are many parts of the world where bandwidth is scarce and expensive (w.r.t. average income). There’s a reason why both Android and Apple have “low data modes”
If you read the tread that follows on the original tweet: It seems that the Apple website respects this and returns a low data version on low bandwidth connections.
Spectrum should’ve been a shared resource from the start. It’s scarce because there’s Massive amounts that have been purchased just to stifle competition and isn’t even in use.
Funny, for all those reasons 5g has moved to a shared model.
As an electrical engineer, I am honestly astounded by how well spectrum has been allocated/shared. It's one of the greatest miracles of the modern era that tens of thousands of antennas can simultaneously jam into a stadium and still have cell service, radio, TV, wifi, walkie talkies, and
Bandwidth is scarce because it's limited by physics. There's some minor inefficiencies, but it's generally pretty good, in terms of bits per second per Hertz.
They have no way to increase sales due to basically complete market saturation, so instead they find new ways to soak their existing customer base.
People always seem to forget how horrible things were when at&t was about to acquire T-Mobile. Had they not been forced to hand TM all that spectrum we’d still be paying $100/mo for 2GB of hard capped data.