I’m honestly amazed they tried that. It’s been so long, it felt like a play to cache in on the name but I feel like a huge chunk of people don’t really remember it or weren’t even around for it.
I've worked with a lot of people at the bottom end of society in the USA. They are given government provided phones they can use so they have access to Google Maps, email, job search apps etc. These phones come with 3GB of regular data per month. After that they drop down to 2G speed, but not in a way that will allow anything to actually load.
Three days into the month these phones are just ewaste.
> Three days into the month these phones are just ewaste.
If someone needs a phone like this for email and job searching and has no other option, 2G speeds will work. It’s not e-waste for the intended purpose.
It would be great if they got higher days caps, though, because let’s be realistic in acknowledging that they’re not only going to use it for Google Maps, email, and job search apps.
In my experience, a slow connection can be less usable for some apps than none at all.
If there’s no connection or you’re in airplane mode, some apps will let you access locally stored/cached data, but as soon as there’s a bad connection, they’ll wipe that data by trying to unsuccessfully refresh it from the server.
Not sure if you are aware that with throttled 2G slow you can't even open a package tracking website these days, because the connection times out before you have downloaded all their asset dependencies. And those kind of websites do not support resumes of downloads (or partial content requests).
So you're stuck in a loop of not being able to use the web because the websites keep downloading stuff you don't need.
It's only usable for a limited number of sites that still work with most JS and images blocked (and of course no video ads). I doubt many tech illiterates are aware of how to constrain their data usage on the web or avoid AAA apps with obscene volumes of data transfer. Another issue is it's not just 2G but also heavily deprioritized.
This is an easy fix: Just cut off their data after it runs out instead of falling back to 2G speeds. Sounds like a win-win for both the data provider and the user.
The obvious easy fix is to give them unlimited data. If the intent is to give them internet, they should give them internet that functions for the modern web.
Note that many European countries have already got rid of their 3G networks completely [0]. So it's either "you have 4G/5G" or "the internet is pretty much unusable", nothing in between.
As someone living in a European country with no 3G network, my experience with mobile data is that when my phone fails to find a 4G signal and switches to 2G (pretty much only happens in remote areas, thankfully), I can as well send my packets using a pigeon carrier, they're going to arrive to the destination sooner.
2G speeds isn't really full access to "the internet" for some parts of the internet.
My experience with 2G speeds is:
1. Open job application site
2. Upload resume pdf
3. Upload required picture of ID
4. Server's nginx config has a hard-coded timeout after 1 minute. Connection error
5. Try to upload again
6. Connection error
A huge number of pieces of the web have hardcoded timeouts and limits designed to stop slowloris style attacks, and if your connection is slow enough, those will prevent you from ever being able to complete some tasks.
This thread is about how a static text article loaded 500 megs in the background. How would someone prepare for that exactly? This is effectively malware as far as your bandwidth is concerned.
People on government assistance are just casually going to Starbucks for free wifi? They probably don’t even have a reliable way to get around. Let them eat cake?
Data caps are to an extent “fake”, in that telcos’ costs aren’t measured in how many bytes their customers download/upload. Telcos’ costs come from renting bandwidth from tier 1 and tier 2 ISPs. This bandwidth is constant.
And for popular websites, they will cache lots of content on their own network or peer directly with data centers so they don’t have to pay for the bandwidth there. The routers will continue routing and the switches will continue switching whether you download 5GBs or 5TBs.
One more way to understand how much of a scam mobile data caps are, is that the same ISP will sell you unlimited fiber plans even though essentially your traffic goes through the same backbone.
Data caps may help lessen congestion on their cell towers, but they don’t need to be as low as they are today.
> Data caps may help lessen congestion on their cell towers
Data caps make congestion worse, because you are more likely to restrict where you use data and people are predictable. You'll no longer use bits everywhere because you care less, you'll use it where everyone else does.
https-everywhere does indeed prevent transparent proxying by ISPs. Mostly this isn't an issue: site owners are less likely to have their content tampered with by a content distribution network than by an ISP, and have full control over which CDN(s) are allowed to act on their behalf. Larger content providers operate their own CDNs, of course.
In the case of TFA, PC Gamer isn't directly consuming the bandwidth with their own servers on their own domain name. It's an ad distribution network doing that, and odds are reasonable they're already colocated someplace with your ISP and the bandwidth consumed by ads is totally irrelevant to everyone except the poor sap at the home end of the last mile.
True, and also when you actually go to apply for a job it often kicks you out to another website, that will use who knows how many mbs? And you have to fill in your details again and again. Each one a different flavour. Sometimes saying the same thing multiple times for the same job ad.
If 2G speeds were what they were when it was heavily used? Sure. Nowadays? Not in my experience. I got downgraded to Google Fi’s 2G in a well-traveled part of Virginia using a flagship Samsung and I couldn’t even load directions on Google Maps where I’d already downloaded most of the map for offline use. 2G ain’t like it used to be when it was still given a second thought by providers.
It’s not only the providers. 2G is 120kbit max on a lot of networks and 50kbit on average. Even a 1MB site, that is lean by today’s standards will take 160 seconds to load.
2G is really from a different age. Does anyone remember WAP and i-mode? I was certainly not able to afford data back then, but that is what all the business’y types were raving about.
If someone needs a phone like this for email and job searching and has no other option, 2G speeds will work. It’s not e-waste for the intended purpose.
Guess how I know you've never actually tried this.
Part of my job is testing the web sites I build in the terrible real-world conditions where our customers are. Places like machine rooms, deep basements, and small towns with only municipal or small-carrier 3G cell service. (In spite of what HN believes, there are plenty of places in America with 3G or even zero cell service.)
2G speeds will not work. The device or one of the essential thousands of processes in it will time out because they were designed by tech bubble tech bros who never use their apps in the real world.
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.
Google maps works okay on slow connections if you download the tiles for the city you're in beforehand (not that non-technical unemployed people should be expected to do that).
The worst thing is load balancers with a 10 or 20 second timeout, because there's almost nothing you can do other than use Opera Mini or something.
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.
Been there, done that, and all without the benefit of a home Internet connection. I also created a couple of scripts that I could run on my desktop computer to install new software or update my operating system. After running the scripts on my computer, I would wander over to the library with nothing more than my phone to download the packages along with grabbing some videos to watch offline.
The issue isn't really living with 500 MB/month of data. For most people, it will simply be knowing that you can do that. The next issue they will face is having the technical ability to actually do so. Then, once you've done all of that, the question will remain: will they be interested in the stripped down Internet. A lot of us who frequent HN may be since the results will still reflect our interests. There are people on IRC who we would want to talk to. There is a slant towards tech sites with RSS. And so on. That isn't going to be reflected in sites targeted at a general audience.
Sure, me and you and everyone here can open a shell connection and do everything with text and it'll work great on 64kbps.
Some of these guys have been locked up for 40 years straight. They're not doing all that extra stuff. They want to go on Indeed or Monster or YouTube. One job site I had to load on my desktop to find out why it wasn't working for them, only to discover the pages had a 250MB payload of random crap downloading, including videos.
The COTS solution for some web browsing is Opera Mini, which may still work? It also uses a proxy to prerender and compress websites, and worked ok at 2G speeds last I used it. It used to work well as a java applet and made the wider internet functional on feature phones. Very solid software.
But as a practical matter, what people rely on phones for are services that are app-based. Good luck completing a Venmo transaction or any amount of banking.
0 of course, but wasn't 3G all shut down in the US in 2022 to open up the airspace?
One of those HN myths that comes from only being willing to Google (or ChatGPT) information, rather than encountering it in the real world.
3G still exists in rural and remote areas that no major carrier wants to serve, at least as of April, 2025 — the last time I did a round of real-world web testing. Next round is in September. Maybe with 5G in the cities, some hand-me-down 4G equipment has made it to the places where I test.
I guess what I am getting from this thread is, there is 3G service out there in the wild. However, in locations where 4G and 5G is available, 3G has been phased out
This doesn’t jibe with my experience trying to make phone calls on rural highways, where it seems there is no signal whatsoever more often than not.
I suppose this could be because ATT-Verizon-T-Mobile used to have 2G in that area (which was discontinued — 900Mhz analog voice band, also decommissioned) has moved on and left swathes of the US without signal, whereas, certain areas (commenter omits an example) never were served by major telecoms and have “evolved” their tech more slowly, so 3G is not decommissioned in those places. In that sense yes there is no contradiction. It still feels like we’ve gone backwards since there are places I used to be able to make a phone call that are now considered remote area with satellite SOS being you’re only way to reach someone
The big-3 have nationwide coverage (well, at least 2 of them).
But even beside that, AFAICT USCellular shut down 3G in January 2024, Appalachian Wireless in Dec 2022, Cellcom in Dec 2023, and C Spire sometime in 2022.
I'm interested to know where exactly public 3G still exists in the USA.
I rarely go over 3gb in a month. But, I also work from home, and I have stable internet connection from home.
If their data plan is the only way they are able to access the internet then yes this is definitely a problem especially with random websites downloading literal gigabytes of ads.
So instead of having website owners ship websites that don't attempt to download the entire internet to your device, your solution is to have people for whom bandwidth is a problem to go somewhere in order to just use the internet?
Calling them ewaste is a little dramatic. While sites like this are a cancer, there is free WiFi in basically every town in America. You can get data for free, even if it’s slightly inconvenient.
I think you may be a bit out of date. There was free WiFi in basically every town. Now it's frequently a vestigial, no-longer-maintained free WiFi that works like crap, because there's no maintenance, because "everyone has cellular data nowadays".
It was a bit dramatic, but I've seen these guys just leave these phones behind once the data is gone. They're not likely to carry it around for the next 27 days until the data is refreshed. They'll generally just hustle for $10 to bribe the phone agent to bypass the SSN check and give them another fresh phone.
The issue is that the wifi isn't available where they need it. If I send them to the SSA building to get some federal docs, it's in a dead zone. It might be in the middle of Chicago but there isn't any free wifi for a mile in any direction from there. How do they pull up Google Maps to get home? And it's not always obvious how to get the free wifi as it doesn't just let you connect, you had to go through a multi-step process of signing in and accepting T&Cs these days. Which the phone doesn't always want to do.
Here in NZ, a lot of people live with less than 1GB of mobile data / month. Once you run out, you have to pay per MB at extortionate rates.
Most people still use sms rather than RCS or Signal or anything secure so they don’t have to pay for the data (most plans have unlimited SMS now)
Of course, the whole country has ultra-fast fibre on unmetered connections (even on the very cheapest plans), so if you’re at work or home it’s fine. Just using data on the go is a non-starter for many
As someone living in a non-net-neutral country this really is the big advantage everybody in net-neutral-land ignores: Meta and Google pay for nearly all of my data use (one of them even seems to cover HN).
I lived for months with a 4GB roaming plan. Given, I was not using it at home since I had a wifi connection, but I rarely came close to using all my data unless I was watching YT videos when traveling or something.
I share your sentiment and I agree we should be more mindful of people with metered/slow connections, but the last statement feels blown out of proportion.
I used to be able to get away with this by downloading music, podcasts and maps at home.
During the iOS 26 upgrade cycle, iOS deleted all my third-party map apps and then expired the locally downloaded apple maps. My phone also somehow lost my downloaded podcasts + music a few times, but, unlike losing three offline map applications, that didn't strand me in the middle of the woods with no cell coverage and no maps.
I agree that 4GB (or even 1GB) goes very far with a working phone OS though.
I arrived in a small airport at midnight. Served only by Uber. Since I use Lyft elsewhere, my phone had deleted the Uber app. It took 15 minutes to download that: crappy Wifi and some kind of 5G dead zone. Sometimes you really need to download the app.
I had data turned off most of the time. At home and in the office I had WiFi. Loaded the map before I left home.
Most other places I was too busy doing whatever I was doing to use a phone. Since upgrading, I guess I can look products up in stores now. That's about it.
I've had a 1GB/mo $5/mo plan from good2go for the last 2 years. I've never gone over it. But that's because I go from wifi to wifi all the time and I'm very careful when I'm on cell. That definitely doesn't work for most people!
Not using it at home likely discounts a lot of personal consumption. If you can get your fill at nights, less need to access the internet during the day.
Our Comcast plan has a monthly data usage of 1.2TB. We rarely go over 600GB in any month but month we nearly hit the limit. I was looking through the router logs to see what was going on and it turned out that somehow one particular Instagram video my spouse was watching would consume huge amounts of bandwidth when the channel was live streaming!
crazy solution that might work for you: open an incognito browser and check for deals for new customers. "someone" I know was able to switch from a $50/1.2TB limited 300mbit plan to a $45/unlimited 1Gbit plan doing this.
if they have a better deal for new users: sign up for a new account under someone else in your household, and cancel your old account after you get your new account hardware setup and working.
Do you have a stable internet connection that is not your phone data plan? Many people in the lower economic class don't have that and their 3gb data plan may be the only 3gb they can use for the internet in any given month.
Many people in the lower economic class don't have that and their 3gb data plan may be the only 3gb they can use for the internet in any given month.
And poor people often share one phone for an entire family, or even one phone among two or three neighboring households. These are a lot of the customers I serve, and it has a lot of unique challenges around accounts, privacy, and yes data use.
The shitty thing is that serving the under-served is almost by definition (and perhaps by design) not lucrative so such folks continue to go under-served.
As we scale our products we think a lot about p99 and ensure we have all the 9s of uptime but even then we ignore the small percentage of folks who can't even begin to load our sites.
Thanks for sharing and for your service, sir/madam!
This stuff is really hard to translate. Imagine asking someone to translate 4chan into Japanese. This is ultra-S-tier hard translations. My goal in learning Japanese is the ability to read this kind of in-joke niche sub-culture slang. I'd love to read the original Densha Otoko posts from 2ch.
Peter Gabriel gave me his in ~2000 because I needed a crappy Mac to test our music streaming and downloading on. I liked the design, but was very underwhelmed by the hardware and software. In that way, it was good for testing. I remember it quickly ended up in a closet with some big elastic bands pushing something onto the trackpad button, since there was an online game at the time called "Hold The Button" with a leaderboard and we wanted to be #1.
He used AOL (it was all still installed lol). He's a nice guy. His parties at his studio in Box were amazing. The studio is amazing because it's built on top of the mill pond and the floors are wood while it's in use, but then they pop off and it's glass above the water. I think his Up album is massively underrated.
Peter Gabriel's "Passion: Music for The Last Temptation of Christ" is his seminal work, IMHO. Just an amazing piece of work. Bought the original CD in 1989, and got the SACD version recently. get goosebumps when playing the tracks at DSF64 resolution via roon. the track "A different drum", is truly inspired.
You can't. A chest fridge/freezer becomes a gravitational singularity sucking random items from every corner of the kitchen to its lid. You can keep trying to return them to their rightful place but in the end it is a fruitless task as the rate of accumulation becomes faster than your speed of repatriation and the contents of the freezer are eventually lost to time behind the "event horizon" of its surface.
I think this is an underrated comment. On (2) you're totally right. Fixing issues is so much easier now I can interrogate an LLM for the right changes to make. It's not for everyone, but it makes my life a lot less stressful.
I've used Windows as my primary desktop for ~35 years and I do my absolute best to housekeep, but I still need to reinstall about once a year or so. I'm militant about installing almost nothing on my primary PC and putting all the janky apps on another PC via RDP too.
The computer I'm writing this on, the earliest things showing in Control Panel were installed in February 2012. It's not a rarely used clean machine, it's a daily use home computer/plaything with a lot of stuff installed/removed over the years from application suites to dev environments and esolangs, to editors, viewers, inspectors, emulators, hypervisors, browsers, chat and streaming clients, game stores, networking tools.
That's not a reason for why I didn't need to wipe and fresh install Windows in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, which was what qingcharles was claiming he had to do.
If you need to reinstall Windows so frequently, have you considered giving Linux a shot? I switched 16 years ago and haven't looked back. Until recently, I used Ubuntu and I think I had to reinstall twice in 15 years, one of which was when I got a new laptop.
Last year I switched to NixOS and while my impression is that it's going to be much more stable even than Ubuntu, installation also only takes me 5 minutes. That is, 5 min until my system is in exactly the state I want, including installed software, window manager config, keyboard shortcuts, desktop wallpaper, GUI theme, etc.
I'm not sure what you think happens if random programs are lying around - they affect nothing except waste a miniscule amount of space. I cleaned up the context menu once, probably the autostart once upon a time, search indexer is off and use Everything instead, antivirus is off ...
Of course I'm still on Windows 10 and will be for the foreseeable future.
My desktop running windows 11 started life as windows 7. Has been used on different hardware both amd and intel. Has been cloned multiple times. And the only problem was a recent windows update that beefed security so i couldn't access shared files on an older clone running on another hardware because of using same sid
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