On Friday I completed the install of a new fibre connection for a customer. They had been stuck on a flaky 1.8Mbps ADSL service for years, and the incumbent wanted $30,000 to go 5 poles down the road to their hours. Yes, in 2021 there are still people who can scroll faster than images load.
Granted. Like I specified, I talked about broadband there.
He preferred to wait all the time until images are loaded to start reading articles, with a flaky slow connection, or to try start reading while parts of the site still load? Especially on a slow connection not having to load the images immediately, or at all if the visitor does not scroll down as much, can make browsing so much better.
Your definition of broadband is wrong. Even 1.8 Mbps counts as broadband. Please be more precise in the terms that you use.
The main problem the customer I was referring to had is that the user interfaces for these websites would not function until they finished loading after 30 to 90 seconds, despite the fact that the user interfaces rarely changed. These were for cloud based accounting and scheduling platforms the business was required to use.
Developers really should have to try to use the systems they build on systems that have low bandwidth / high latency network connections rather than the typical fibre fed office environment. If you can build a website that works well for that use case, it's probably going to be incredibly snappy on a fast connection. Judging by how bloated the web is these days, that is rarely the case in today's world.
What usually happens there is that the sites do not work because the JS wasn't downloaded and interpreted yet. That happens more often when all the images are always downloaded when loading the page. Lazy loading of images is one method to address exactly this problem :)
My definition of broadband is correct, and 1.8Mbps does not match it. Where I live 1.8Mbps just is not legal broadband. In the US that also does not count as broadband anymore, see https://broadbandnow.com/report/fcc-broadband-definition/, and it hasn't for over a decade.
It's partly JS, it's partly the data populating the tables.
I must say that the FCC really messed up by redefining broadband when they were the ones that had originally defined it in terms of RF spectrum usage. Here in Canada, the telecom regulatory body set the Basic Service Objective to be 50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload. They didn't try to redefine what broadband is and overload a term that already had meaning in the telecommunications space.
Personally I think latency is more important with modern internet connections. 10 Mbps is still quite usable for a lot of things, but not if it's 500ms RTT via a satellite. Sadly most telecom regulators ignore latency.
