Re: Bandwidth Still is a Real Issue

"David Woolley":
> For those on the list that insist that site bloat isn't an accessibility
> issue, I've just been on a tour of mainland China and I found that my
> chosen roaming email provider (Freeserve) varied between the almost
> unuseable (finally got the home page and service after trying for three
> quarters of an hour) and totally unuseable (never got the home page).
> I got some work done on Demon even when the primary one was a writeoff,
> but Demon don't allow sending and I had intended to have my home machine
> clear that mailbox, except for a power failure that stopped it.

Firstly, you should've had a number, including a good local one, I forget
who I was using when in India, but it made a big difference, the routes
back to the UK (or US) aren't great, but the bandwidth is often available
to local sites (depending on the initial link.)

> This means that a large proportion of the worlds population is being
> excluded from such services for a significant part of the time.

One thing to note, that in my experience in India, Cafe's were worse than
home users, they had win98 connection sharing a single 56k line across a
number of machines, often oddly configured, playing with their
configurations could make big differences.  When you met a clueful cafe,
or a single "home" user machine, the connection was often much more
similar to your UK 56k experience.

> Once the bandwidth was there, machine performance wasn't an issue, and
> there seemed to be a Windows/IE mono-culture.

Pirate of course...

Bandwidth is still an accessibility issue in this country (UK) in any
case, I see no reason to invoke China etc.  when you can't justify it in
the UK.

Jim.

Received on Sunday, 14 October 2001 21:32:00 UTC