Bandwidth

I have been noticing that the gmail page has been taking longer and longer to load on my pc and on my phone. I did a factory reset on my phone and cleaned out my pc; no difference. Checked if my broadband connection has slowed down; speedtest.org shows I am getting reasonable speeds.

Yesterday, in desperation, I clicked on the link for slow connections and it loaded instantly. Which leads me to believe that gmail sends down a ton of other data down with my message list that I do not really use. I guess Google presumes the world is on Google-Fibre speeds.

As I started to dig deeper, I noticed a lot of sites appear to make ambitious presumptions about available bandwidth in planning their content and layout. It also occurred to me that in our offices we are getting used to far higher speeds on our dedicated IP leased lines. This spoils us and we start to get dissatisfied with the speed at home.

In the mid-90s, browsers were geared to work with dial-up modems and even allowed you to not load images - so that you could get the text down real quick and that was a default setting for many of us back then. We clicked on the image icon if we wanted to see the image. I checked this morning and the setting is still available on my phone. It is also available on chrome.

Since we are not on 56.6 kbps dial-up modems, browsing without images might be a bit draconian, but I do wish more websites would offer the gmail feature of 'click here for slow connections' and bring down text and images but no videos and flash content unless I choose to. Until then, I have found a work around. I have installed an older version of adobe flash. My browser now believes it is unsafe to display flash and video over this older version and asks for permission before it displays.

I can now visit NDTV.com without having to hear all the noisy videos playing while I am trying to scan the headlines.

While we wait for fibre-optic last mile connectivity, we might want to think about how much content we really need or even want streaming down our pipes.