Before calling it "the worst", I'd like more detail on how to do the comparison with the oil crises of the 1970's.
There's a graph in today's (March 28/29) Wall Street Journal that does exactly that, and shows that what's happening now is both currently slightly worse than the 1970's, and the worst oil shock in history.
the specific type of person that is buying hundreds of guns, tons of dehydrated meals
Both of which are available at Wal-Mart.
I always knew about the guns, but only recently discovered that Wal-Mart stores (at least in Louisiana) carry huge buckets with weeks worth of dehydrated survival food.
This is a reductionist view of even the suburban United States IMO. There are plenty of locales in what I'd call 'middle suburbia', which I'd define as less than an hour from whatever their geographical city center is. Even in these areas, multiple day power outages, or other localized or regional disasters have been endemic in the last 25 years; often due to utility or local resource mismanagement.
Take, for example, the 2018 California Camp Fire, the various southern winter flash power outages, or the endemic hurricane season pretty much everywhere exposed to the middle or southern pacific.
"For hurricanes" is a cute way to minimize it, but in much of the country it's rather little that separates you from being left to your own devices, at least for a little while, even when you're just suburban and haven't even looked out to the rural U.S.
There is a real deferred maintenance and resource mismanagement issue in this country. The increasing evidence of "preppers" and items like ration buckets becoming prevalent at bulk store operations like Walmart & Costco are early indications of the increasing prevalence of these issues.
Take a survey of the items that are always available at most Costos or Sam's Clubs across the country and you'll see similar results. They essentially market decentralized infrastructure for those that can afford it (or those who can't afford not to have it).
Say what you will about Mormons, but they take the idea of local stockpiles amazingly seriously. It rises to the point where they subsidize stores selling bulk food product direct to customers, at a scale that otherwise you'd need a Sysco or commercial restaurant license in most places to get access to.
Not required. It's recommended by the church leadership though to have a garden and to have a years supply of food storage if you can. I'm not a Mormon but appreciate it as a good idea.
If you're thinking about a period without power after a disaster, you're supposed to have a gallon of clean water per person per day, along with food that can be prepared in that environment. At least according to https://www.ready.gov/kit.
For me, it made a ton of sense to buy a couple of boxes of MREs and some Mountain House meals for this. They last decades, and they double as camping food.
Many people in the lower economic class don't have that and their 3gb data plan may be the only 3gb they can use for the internet in any given month.
And poor people often share one phone for an entire family, or even one phone among two or three neighboring households. These are a lot of the customers I serve, and it has a lot of unique challenges around accounts, privacy, and yes data use.
The shitty thing is that serving the under-served is almost by definition (and perhaps by design) not lucrative so such folks continue to go under-served.
As we scale our products we think a lot about p99 and ensure we have all the 9s of uptime but even then we ignore the small percentage of folks who can't even begin to load our sites.
Thanks for sharing and for your service, sir/madam!
If someone needs a phone like this for email and job searching and has no other option, 2G speeds will work. It’s not e-waste for the intended purpose.
Guess how I know you've never actually tried this.
Part of my job is testing the web sites I build in the terrible real-world conditions where our customers are. Places like machine rooms, deep basements, and small towns with only municipal or small-carrier 3G cell service. (In spite of what HN believes, there are plenty of places in America with 3G or even zero cell service.)
2G speeds will not work. The device or one of the essential thousands of processes in it will time out because they were designed by tech bubble tech bros who never use their apps in the real world.
When the power's out and broadband is down, if you are lucky the cell network is still up. However, everyone fails over to it simultaneously, so there's no way you'll get 2G speeds out of your 5G plan with 5 bars.
I throttled my browser dev tools to 2G and clicked reload. After 2+ minutes, it popped up a "It looks like you are on a slow connection" modal (sometimes this loads on top of the outage info, obscuring the data you want!), so I clicked "Use low bandwidth version". After 51 seconds, the debugger says page load is finished (for the low bandwidth one), but the page is just a white background, and the browser "loading" animation is still running.
After 2.17 more minutes, I get a form where you can type in an address + a bunch of irrelevant info. I typed an address, waited a minute, then typed this paragraph. After 1.5 minutes, it showed my address in the autocomplete menu, and I clicked it.
33 seconds later, it started loading a google maps ajax. 47 seconds after that, it displayed a header, with a white body. 1.33 minutes later, ignoring styling, it returned the string "power is on".
(No map, etc, at this point.)
Had this been a real outage in a storm, I'd be standing outside in the rain, or in a situation where getting cell coverage for more than 30 seconds at a time is impossible if you're holding the phone. I usually just put the phone on a carefully placed chair, then back away slowly.
Anyway it takes 9 minutes under ideal scenarios (no drops) to send 30 bytes of address, and an 11 byte response. 44 bytes / 540 seconds = 0.08 bytes per second good put.
For reference, voyager can send 20 bytes per second, so it's 250x faster than this. Morse code / telegraphs are typically sent at 1.5 words per minute, where a word is 15 characters, so 0.375 bytes per second = 4.6x faster.
Remember, these are simulated conditions for the PG&E site. My record best time getting it to load during a major outage is 45 minutes, not 9.
Thank you. I often get people responding that 2G speed will work fine for email, chat, Google Maps etc. Maybe if I installed an IMAP client on their phone, maybe.
But I can promise you from sitting with them dozens of times things like Google Maps are unusable once the connection is throttled. It might load some of the map, some of the time. But it never loads all of it and it is just plain unworkable. Even if it loads some of it it takes so long that the busses have gone past by the time they've tried to figure out what direction they need to go.
Google maps works okay on slow connections if you download the tiles for the city you're in beforehand (not that non-technical unemployed people should be expected to do that).
The worst thing is load balancers with a 10 or 20 second timeout, because there's almost nothing you can do other than use Opera Mini or something.
Because Google Maps is all they know? I've been on the web for 30+ years (wrote my own html home page by hand in 1995 while doing my master's) and have just now heard of "Osmand" for maybe the 2nd time in my life. The other being a few months ago. If I haven't heard of it, how would anyone else who isn't technical hear about it?
> If I haven't heard of it, how would anyone else who isn't technical hear about it?
If you assume that mapping services on a low-to-no bandwidth connection are important to them, they'll hear about it through word of mouth. Anything that solves a real problem will spread that way.
Contrapositively, we can conclude that mapping isn't much of a problem for these people.
I have the same background, and I've not heard of Osmand, though I do try to use map downloader apps when I'm abroad, just in case.
The other problem with any map tile downloading is that it eats up their entire 3GB of transfer and their phone is dead before they even start. Catch-22.
Osmand is great, but it's difficult to use, it doesn't have good place search, and it doesn't plan public transport trips very well.
My experience trying to get it to find a route to work just now involved finding my street name but not being able to enter my address, not being able to enter my workplace's exact address either, getting told to take an express train to a stop that I know it never stops at during peak hour, and searching in vain for a way to change the trip time. I bet it also can't handle delays, cancellations, or bus replacements.
Maybe it works better in your city? I notice you wrote "we can conclude that mapping isn't much of a problem for these people", but you could use the same evidence to conclude Osmand isn't much of a solution for their problem.
(I will note that I use it for hiking and it's very good for that, as it is for cycling.)
There is a spot near me near a local college that is a worthless dead zone for data.
The signal is terrible, but it’s there. You can talk on the phone or send texts.
Surfing is horrible. At times you get great speeds. Two seconds later it feels like slow dial up. Really that’s what it feels like most of the time, any kind of speed is the anomaly.
As said in other comments, very few apps actually handle this well. They seem to expect that you either have a good connection or nothing.
It’s been like that for a decade plus. I assume it’s just overloaded and will never be fixed.
0 of course, but wasn't 3G all shut down in the US in 2022 to open up the airspace?
One of those HN myths that comes from only being willing to Google (or ChatGPT) information, rather than encountering it in the real world.
3G still exists in rural and remote areas that no major carrier wants to serve, at least as of April, 2025 — the last time I did a round of real-world web testing. Next round is in September. Maybe with 5G in the cities, some hand-me-down 4G equipment has made it to the places where I test.
Thank you for proving my point, that people on HN falsely think they know more than others because they can Google a link, even though what's happening on the ground is entirely different.
Reality ≠ policy papers, press releases, or web links.
I guess what I am getting from this thread is, there is 3G service out there in the wild. However, in locations where 4G and 5G is available, 3G has been phased out
This doesn’t jibe with my experience trying to make phone calls on rural highways, where it seems there is no signal whatsoever more often than not.
I suppose this could be because ATT-Verizon-T-Mobile used to have 2G in that area (which was discontinued — 900Mhz analog voice band, also decommissioned) has moved on and left swathes of the US without signal, whereas, certain areas (commenter omits an example) never were served by major telecoms and have “evolved” their tech more slowly, so 3G is not decommissioned in those places. In that sense yes there is no contradiction. It still feels like we’ve gone backwards since there are places I used to be able to make a phone call that are now considered remote area with satellite SOS being you’re only way to reach someone
The big-3 have nationwide coverage (well, at least 2 of them).
But even beside that, AFAICT USCellular shut down 3G in January 2024, Appalachian Wireless in Dec 2022, Cellcom in Dec 2023, and C Spire sometime in 2022.
I'm interested to know where exactly public 3G still exists in the USA.
> I'm interested to know where exactly public 3G still exists in the USA.
I gotchu, but I wanna be clear that it is all just fringe/regional operators (which is what the claim was originally about anyway, not about major telcos).
I found a couple with user reports claiming 3G support still being active in random pockets of Wyoming/Colorado/etc. (but no confirmation on the official website), and one with confirmation on the official website.
The one with the official confirmation is Union Wireless[0], with UMTS being a stand-in for 3G (color-coded in grey on their coverage map; mostly southern Wyoming plus parts of Colorado, Utah, and Idaho).
I agree with your overall point though. Functionally, 3G is dead in the US. But factually, there are a few holdout fringe remote areas that still have it.
I used to have an extremely cheap phone plan that had 500MB data, then 64kbps for the rest of the month.
You'd be surprised how far you can get with that. IRC works just fine (as long as you use Quassel w/ Quasseldroid), HN works well, so does reddit (via redreader). RSS readers and wikipedia work as well, and for general web browsing you can set up a readability proxy (basically Firefox' Reader Mode, but server-side). And of course email works really well, too.
Been there, done that, and all without the benefit of a home Internet connection. I also created a couple of scripts that I could run on my desktop computer to install new software or update my operating system. After running the scripts on my computer, I would wander over to the library with nothing more than my phone to download the packages along with grabbing some videos to watch offline.
The issue isn't really living with 500 MB/month of data. For most people, it will simply be knowing that you can do that. The next issue they will face is having the technical ability to actually do so. Then, once you've done all of that, the question will remain: will they be interested in the stripped down Internet. A lot of us who frequent HN may be since the results will still reflect our interests. There are people on IRC who we would want to talk to. There is a slant towards tech sites with RSS. And so on. That isn't going to be reflected in sites targeted at a general audience.
Sure, me and you and everyone here can open a shell connection and do everything with text and it'll work great on 64kbps.
Some of these guys have been locked up for 40 years straight. They're not doing all that extra stuff. They want to go on Indeed or Monster or YouTube. One job site I had to load on my desktop to find out why it wasn't working for them, only to discover the pages had a 250MB payload of random crap downloading, including videos.
The COTS solution for some web browsing is Opera Mini, which may still work? It also uses a proxy to prerender and compress websites, and worked ok at 2G speeds last I used it. It used to work well as a java applet and made the wider internet functional on feature phones. Very solid software.
But as a practical matter, what people rely on phones for are services that are app-based. Good luck completing a Venmo transaction or any amount of banking.
I remember 10+ years ago I had to do my on-boarding paperwork from a research station on the Greenland ice sheet. Workday would just not work with the high latency (but otherwise, not terribly slow) connection. I had to remote desktop to a CONUS computer and use a browser there in order for it to work...
In 1999 I got a job to build one of the first streaming and download systems for the major record labels. Working from home as they didn't have offices yet. I'd been unemployed for months, and the day before I started my broadband got cut off for nonpayment. For the first few weeks all I had was my 9600bps serial connection to my Nokia 9000i. I had to remotely re-encode hundreds of CDs in 2Kbps audio so I could at least debug all my code and stream the music off the servers...
the difference between 0 and unit above 0 on iPhones is about 30% volume.
I have found that when playing audio to a HomePod, pressing Volume Up on the phone increases the volume by 1.
But if you immediately press Volume Down, it goes down by 0.5. So, with two button presses you can get the half-step increase you wanted in the first place.
It's like adding "a little" to a volume change command with Siri.
"Siri, turn the volume up a little" turns the volume up 0.5.
"Siri, turn the volume up" turns the volume up one.
"Siri, turn the volume up a lot" turns the volume up two.
In macOS, there used to be a modifier key to have the volume change in half-steps, too, but I've forgotten what it is.
I think the only place that Apple has done a good job with volume controls is the AirPods Max. But even there, I'd like more granularity at the low end.
I wouldn't be so sure. I have been impressed by several things that seem to be complex but a way to be automated was found. Sure a no controlled environment is not conducive to automation, but who said a tow truck wouldn't be a part of the process? Washing a car has been automated with the precursor that the car is brought to the controlled environment first.
I have even replaced car tires before and yet still have this opinion.
This is the funniest possible answer to "Sounds like you've never changed a tire. Or at least not outside of a very controlled environment."
"Oh, you think I've never changed a tire? Well here is my abstract high level understanding of the steps to changing a tire! And have you considered the quintessential controlled environment for putting tires onto cars?"
The "edge cases" make a simple task like this more difficult. What if the nuts are stripped? What if the terrain under/around the car is uneven or not solid ground? What if it's raining or snowing or hailing? What if the driver of the car is irrationally upset and kicks your tire-changing robot over? What if a tire change was requested, but it's clear (to a human) that there is more work that needs to be done?
Every new successful tool doesn't start by trying to meet every need or edge case. They perfect the main case, and then edge cases in priority of likelihood.
Car washes are automated even though they haven't answered the edge cases of how to wash your car when your car is rolled on its side or a terrorist is actively blowing up the equipment. They simply only operate when your car is right side up (and other conditions, like in neutral, wipers off, and a driver who is willing to not exit the vehicle) and when there aren't active bombings on the building. And other "edge" cases.
Just because there is a possibility for something to not work, doesn't make it useless. Automated tire replacements could start with very rigid cases where they are applicable, and expact the scope slowly to allow more cases, like a bent wheel or poor weather.
Then you see a mechanic for the 5% of cases where it's weird? If you think AI is replacing 100% of software engineers anytime soon, idk what to tell you.
There's a graph in today's (March 28/29) Wall Street Journal that does exactly that, and shows that what's happening now is both currently slightly worse than the 1970's, and the worst oil shock in history.
And remember that this isn't over yet.