fyr.io

As I write this (three days prior to the post date) I'm enjoying a quiet evening as the family sleeps, and I have barely any connection to the internet. We're talking almost zero signal strength 2G Edge, with the rare and elusive 3G HSPA, at best, on a phone. And it's kinda great?

We've taken a last minute short break away for the weekend and whilst there is WiFi available, I neither trust it nor do I want to pay an obscene amount for it. Besides, I haven't got any technology aside from the phone and had no plans to use any anyway.

I have found myself being very intentional about the websites I check and how often I check them whilst here. I'm fairly minimal on that front anyway with no social media (discord and mastodon aside, and even then they're new accounts with only a few people/servers/tags followed) to doomscroll nor any news or current event type sites on my regular reads list.

All I have done is taken some time to catch up on some indie/small/smol-web sites and have been reading the backlog of posts from my regular reads. When it comes to checking something on the "regular" or "commercial" web, I'm finding it very difficult due to the huge latency I'm experiencing here. More often than not sites, when they load at all, which isn't a guarantee, don't work in a usable way. This is often because they don't function at a basic level without copius amounts of JavaScript to render the page. The megabytes of libraries and dependencies have failed to download, or have timed out, or have errored expecting other resources to have loaded already when they haven't. Poor design, come on people this is web-building-101!

This is disappointing but not new. I often browse with JavaScript disabled and very often need to go through the effort of enabling it bit by bit. It's tiresome. This is slightly different, though. Because of the high latency I'm finding myself trying to navigate somewhere (for example, looking up a movie on IMDb or something) as a side quest to the main quest that is whatever I happen to be doing at the time. What I mean by that is that I type my search query into the URL bar, put my phone down and carry on with what I'm doing. When I get a chance I'll pick the phone up and see if it worked. If not, I try again (if I can still be bothered and it's actually still worthwhile) and if it has worked then I'll tap the relevant search result. Down goes the phone, back I go to whatever I was doing. I'll check again in a few minutes probably.

If this click-and-wait seems familiar then you're likely an older reader that hails from the dialup days. I remember well the frustrations of those days, but have a more recent experience of this too.

Before I moved into the current home I had FTTC, 80/20 internet. It seems about average now for a residential connection but at the time felt really fast. When we moved into our current place, the best internet we could get was a fairly high latency 2/0.2 (2mbps download, 0.2mbps upload) ADSL connection. We were literally on the very cusp of a functioning connection. We could just about stream Netflix but it wasn't great. YouTube was often okay on 360p but sometimes that wasn't thin enough either. And it would all come crashing down if one of us loaded a web page whilst a video was being streamed.

I distinctly remember, during the COVID lockdown, working from home and being disconnected from video conferencing software (like Zoom or whatever) when the family put Netflix or Youtube on. Audio-only (no video) on the conference call was generally okay, but any video feeds were choppy at best. In fact I never transmitted video as it would ramp up the latency so bad I couldn't do anything else. A great excuse for someone who hates seeing themselves on a screen :)

We eventually figured out some quick and easy wins to bring our upload speed up slightly. I remember our download hitting the mighty 3.5mbps one time. That was great.

A year or so ago we got fibre cables installed and now those problems and frustrations are a thing of the past!

I gotta say, I don't miss the latency or lack of bandwidth. Working in the IT field with those limitations affecting work performance was frustrating. But I do miss the resource management mini game we'd play every time something internet-y was needed. I miss not having instant gratification or answers to queries.

I kinda like the "look something up" thing not being the main thing I am doing, both now as I sit here on this low-tech holiday and back at home when we had poor internet connectivity. I am now only looking at my screen when I needed to, instead of staring at it for long periods of time, with the content streaming into my eyeballs and glueing my attention to that little square of glass. It feels... better.

I know this is a behavioural thing, I want to try to learn this as a habit. No doubt once I get back home I'll immediately go back to 'staring at the screen' being the only thing I'm doing, but I'm going to try and be more aware of how long I look at my phone. It's a tool, not a distraction from life.

Maybe I should artificially increase latency on my devices until it's normalised behaviour...