Here's my favorite example of this:

https://pgealerts.alerts.pge.com/outage-tools/outage-map/

When the power's out and broadband is down, if you are lucky the cell network is still up. However, everyone fails over to it simultaneously, so there's no way you'll get 2G speeds out of your 5G plan with 5 bars.

I throttled my browser dev tools to 2G and clicked reload. After 2+ minutes, it popped up a "It looks like you are on a slow connection" modal (sometimes this loads on top of the outage info, obscuring the data you want!), so I clicked "Use low bandwidth version". After 51 seconds, the debugger says page load is finished (for the low bandwidth one), but the page is just a white background, and the browser "loading" animation is still running.

After 2.17 more minutes, I get a form where you can type in an address + a bunch of irrelevant info. I typed an address, waited a minute, then typed this paragraph. After 1.5 minutes, it showed my address in the autocomplete menu, and I clicked it.

33 seconds later, it started loading a google maps ajax. 47 seconds after that, it displayed a header, with a white body. 1.33 minutes later, ignoring styling, it returned the string "power is on".

(No map, etc, at this point.)

Had this been a real outage in a storm, I'd be standing outside in the rain, or in a situation where getting cell coverage for more than 30 seconds at a time is impossible if you're holding the phone. I usually just put the phone on a carefully placed chair, then back away slowly.

Anyway it takes 9 minutes under ideal scenarios (no drops) to send 30 bytes of address, and an 11 byte response. 44 bytes / 540 seconds = 0.08 bytes per second good put.

For reference, voyager can send 20 bytes per second, so it's 250x faster than this. Morse code / telegraphs are typically sent at 1.5 words per minute, where a word is 15 characters, so 0.375 bytes per second = 4.6x faster.

Remember, these are simulated conditions for the PG&E site. My record best time getting it to load during a major outage is 45 minutes, not 9.

Thank you. I often get people responding that 2G speed will work fine for email, chat, Google Maps etc. Maybe if I installed an IMAP client on their phone, maybe.

But I can promise you from sitting with them dozens of times things like Google Maps are unusable once the connection is throttled. It might load some of the map, some of the time. But it never loads all of it and it is just plain unworkable. Even if it loads some of it it takes so long that the busses have gone past by the time they've tried to figure out what direction they need to go.

There is a spot near me near a local college that is a worthless dead zone for data.

The signal is terrible, but it’s there. You can talk on the phone or send texts.

Surfing is horrible. At times you get great speeds. Two seconds later it feels like slow dial up. Really that’s what it feels like most of the time, any kind of speed is the anomaly.

As said in other comments, very few apps actually handle this well. They seem to expect that you either have a good connection or nothing.

It’s been like that for a decade plus. I assume it’s just overloaded and will never be fixed.

I used to have an extremely cheap phone plan that had 500MB data, then 64kbps for the rest of the month.

You'd be surprised how far you can get with that. IRC works just fine (as long as you use Quassel w/ Quasseldroid), HN works well, so does reddit (via redreader). RSS readers and wikipedia work as well, and for general web browsing you can set up a readability proxy (basically Firefox' Reader Mode, but server-side). And of course email works really well, too.

> (In spite of what HN believes, there are plenty of places in America with 3G or even zero cell service.)

0 of course, but wasn't 3G all shut down in the US in 2022 to open up the airspace?