As somebody with fast Internet at home and at work, I still want to see far smaller page weights because I spend a lot of time working on trains or browsing the web on my phone. Internet connections in those situations can be fast, but they are often very inconsistent, both in terms of speed and latency.
I've lost count of the number of times a page has unnecessarily been rendered unusable because although it had loaded all of the important stuff, it was waiting around for a web font or JavaScript to finish loading and I was going through an area with poor signal.
That's in a developed country with solid, ubiquitous telecoms infrastructure. Most of the world – and most of the people in the world – don't have it as good, so it matters even more for them.
A big Indian conglomerate, Reliance, recently launched a service called 'Jio' that basically disrupted the entire mobile internet landscape.
Broadband access has improved drastically as well in the last one year. I've gone from paying $40/month for a 16mbps connection with a data cap of 80GB to $12/month for a 50mbps connection with no data cap.
It's come to a point where I don't think at all about data usage or my phone bill.
Which is why I say that AMP is a solution in the wrong direction. If India can make data so cheap, it's only a matter of time before other markets follow suit. AMP is a solution to a dying problem, not an emerging one.
The German telecom and ISP markets are a joke. Paying a fee just to be connected, most people being locked in for 2 years, garbage speeds and FUPs, the lack of local wireless ISPs, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if the average consumer was worse off that in the US, even though the country is mostly flat and relatively small so presumably easy to cover.
Yes, a big part of the reason is that 3G/4G/5G frequencies were auctioned off by the state, and the bids reached absurd heights. To recoup that initial investment, each new generation of mobile broadband starts out at a huge premium compared to similar markets, and then those premium prices become the norm.
Then only serve AMP pages to people from the developing world, why do I need to deal with a crippled version of the web because some other people have crap internet ?
Data may be absurdly cheap and free wifi might be easy to find where you live, but it certainly isn't everywhere.
Even if you do find wifi, it's often slow or totally broken. It usually requires you to log in and be tracked. Often the wifi network operator knows every place you visit when they have a network located there, even if you don't deliberately log in at those locations.
I've lost count of the number of times a page has unnecessarily been rendered unusable because although it had loaded all of the important stuff, it was waiting around for a web font or JavaScript to finish loading and I was going through an area with poor signal.
That's in a developed country with solid, ubiquitous telecoms infrastructure. Most of the world – and most of the people in the world – don't have it as good, so it matters even more for them.