I just feel like they renamed 4G into 5G, 3G into 4G and Edge into 3G.
Jokes aside, I know the overall amount of data to load today per website/video/images is way heavier than before, but still. A simple Google search doesn’t require much more to load than 12 years ago.
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I actually have the opposite experience. When Im in a crowded area like a football stadium or similar, internet often works better when I force my phone to use 3g since the 4g frequencies are full.
Software expands to fill the hardware available. What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.
When hardware gets faster, programmers get lazier and make slower software, or just fill it with more and more ads.
When I got a Pentium in the 90s I could start Word in less than a second. Now it takes longer, even if Word seems to have mostly the same functionality.
Induced demand. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
When the median of usage increases, the supply settles close to long-time average.
This is also why you don’t solve rush hour by building roads. It just leads to more people using roads, leading to rush hour returning.
There are few things some of the commentators missed.
1. Back then there weren’t as many devices connecting to internet services simultaneously. Bottlenecking is very frequent issue at certain hours of the day.
2. Sites were simpler and smaller. Now sites are much more complex, have more content and use a lot more data, more ads loading in the background …
3. Even the device you are using may contribute to the slow rendering of sites.
When multiple problems meet at once slowdowns become annoying really fast. It’s the price of everyone having a computer in their palm 24/7
They actually turned 3G off over here. Caused a bunch of ruckus when older devices suddenly didn’t work, I remember it being mostly cars that couldn’t connect to anything anymore.
No one seems to have mentioned the fact that websites have become apps. They’re no longer simple HTML but full blown applications with large bundle sizes.
No. I helped rollout 3g and 4g in my state. I configured it, tested it and performed speed tests. 3g was fine. You could usually access the internet and get done what you needed. Might get a meg or two. You might have described it as fast if you were used to nothing. 4g got you hundreds of megs, maybe up to a gig. This was fast and probably comparable to your desktop experience.
I have no idea where you are getting a 3g signal to compare. ATT, sprint, tmobile have all shut down their 3g. Verizon will soon follow suit. The support for 3g has been in decline for awhile. It isnt monitored as well as 4g. The people who installed it are gone. We dont pay the vendor for support like we once did. So if there was an outage we might not know until a customer complained. Who even has 3g, who would bother calling to say it isnt working, how many of those calls would it take to generate interest, and how would resolving it get prioritized if there were any (and i mean any) other issues to work on.
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