original bit basher - Slashdot User

The State of UK Broadband — Not So Fast 279

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday November 26, 2008 @06:29AM from the but-you-have-actual-competition dept.

Barence writes "The deplorable speed of British broadband connections has been revealed in the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics, which show that 42.3% of broadband connections are slower than 2Mb/sec. More worryingly, the ONS statistics are based on the connection's headline speed, not actual throughput, which means that many more British broadband connections are effectively below the 2Mb/sec barrier. Better still, a separate report issued yesterday by Ofcom revealed that the majority of broadband users had no idea about the speed of their connection anyway."

Comment Re:No Script (Score 1) 450

by original bit basher on Saturday October 25, 2008 @08:47PM (#25513431) Attached to: Browsing Frugally Without Wasting Bandwidth?

Back in the bad old days when the 56KB shaping you are dropped down to was the top end, I did indeed use Lynx. But from a shell account at my ISP (surely at a university there's a Linux system you can log onto with ssh). Therefore the download to my system was only the opening screen... the remainder of the download went to my ISP host, which was high speed and at no charge. For most pages the first or second screen was enough to reject pages that were not going to do me any good.

I still sometimes use this trick to this day for other reasons. But I have to admit more and more pages are not friendly to anything but browsers with Javas and Flash enabled. And Web 2 stuff requires it. But,

May I put a plug in for the Viewable With Any Browser Campaign at http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/ as I believed in that before I found the campaign.

And if you don't need fancy graphics or fonts in your E-mail, there is pine/alpine text based e-mail agents. Again, less hit on your bandwidth if you run them from a shell account.

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