[wruza]

>and should one of those requests fail, apps will hang

That also happens on 'good' connections, when some crappy isp router drops the packet without any icmp. The request fails only after a tcp timeout, which is large enough to be noticed. I cannot understand why asynchronous js requests do not involve smart adaptive human-oriented timeouts and why this problem is still not solved in general. TCP timeouts are simply insane nowadays.