Dial-up Comcast?

This morning when I was doing my normal things on my tablet and drinking my coffee, I noticed that my internet connection seemed to be a bit flaky. Pictures were loading slowly or inconsistently. I figured that was on Reddit’s side because they have been going above and beyond to make things stink for anyone not using the awful official app. I didn’t think much of it for that reason.

When Molly left, I came upstairs on my computer and noticed when I did my normal doas pkg upgrade that it was painfully slow. Not on my server, though. When I say slow, I mean ridiculously slow. The speeds were mostly in the dial-up internet days range, with a few peaks to near 100 k/s.

It got me thinking of a couple of things. Number one, I don’t really miss those days of inconsistent speeds and random disconnects due to old phone lines. I don’t miss it even a little. When I would try to download something, it almost always seemed to fail near the end of the download.

Don’t get me wrong. Those days of dial-up internet were amazing, with countless new things to see on the web and such. It wasn’t like today, where nearly everything is cookie-cutter and highly bloated. Slow connections had to be considered. Most websites were at least in some ways quirky back then. There were so many new ideas. Sure, some of them were awful, but I miss the uniqueness of it all.

These days websites assume that everyone has the fastest, most stable internet connection possible just to do mundane things. Here’s looking at you, Twitter. It always amazes me how much design is considered over efficiency.

Back when I took care of someone’s business website, I kept it simple and fast. I was no designer, of course, but it worked everywhere I tested it. They had a friend who started talking about how it needed to be responsive and modern. He took it over, which I was relieved about. He turned it into the bloated cookie-cutter WordPress site. Sure, it’s responsive, Firefox says it has 64 requests in developer tools. Surely that could be dramatically reduced.

Another thing to note is that it is so responsive that it has a giant sticky header. The header is a size that doesn’t even allow me to see one line of text with my browser set up the way it works best for me on my computer. On my phone, the header takes up about a third of the screen. So I use responsive sarcastically when describing it.

I tried to load it with this unstable internet. It’s been well over a minute now, and still nothing is showing from that website. It’s busy loading the fonts and all the other bullshit. If I were looking for that service, I would have gone elsewhere by now. Five minutes later it still only showed the menu and contact information but no indication of whether they would provide the service I needed.

Comcast did improve some this morning after being completely down for a good hour or so. I know we had plenty of issues last fall while they were doing upgrades on their system. Maybe they shouldn’t have let it go for decades?

I actually wondered if it was at least in part due to the solar storm. That would have been interesting at least.