Engineering for Slow Internet – brr

The author, an IT worker who spent 14 months in Antarctica, argues that web and app engineering often ignores slow, intermittent links, using his South Pole experience as the example. At the South Pole, he reports round-trip latency of about 750 milliseconds, speeds from a couple kbps up to 2 mbps on a good day, and a satellite connection available only a few hours a day as of October 2023. In one case, a messaging app that needed nearly 20 MB of JavaScript gave up and restarted loading when it did not finish within a fixed time limit, so reloads wasted bandwidth and took hours to send a short message that could otherwise have loaded in about 15 minutes.