| Mmm. Repeatedly what makes a big difference has been ambient availability. Something is "just there" and you rely on it without even thinking about it - the way we mostly take clean water for granted in in the industrialised world. I believe this was important for DSL and similar technologies often labelled "broadband" Internet service. Having 5Mbps rather than 50kbps seems important but what I'm confident really mattered was that the former was Always On, you didn't have to "go online" to check email or do a search or watch a video any more, and that changes how you think about everything. For encrypted messaging that's delivered by systems like Whatsapp (and of course Signal) because everything is always encrypted all the time. It is not delivered when you need to explicitly "turn on" encryption, no real users will do that for routine conversations. It makes a huge difference in transit too, transit engineers call it "metro service" - once you schedule at high enough frequency users change how they use the service. If there's one train a day people need to plan "OK, the train is at 11:23 so I need to be at the station a few minutes before that". When there's one bus a minute (some London peak bus routes) that never occurs to the passenger at all. They just catch a bus when they need one, because obviously there will be a bus, there is always a bus. In many countries 4G wireless Internet has this sort of "ambient availability" outdoors in populated areas, but not so much in the wilderness or indoors. EduRoam (and to a lesser extent GovRoam) do this for WiFi. The experience is that whether you're at your university or some foreign university maybe for a conference, WiFi just works the same everywhere magically. Autocrypt seems to have some thoughts towards ambient availability but it's a long way from here. I wish you luck but if you can't reach that point it's probably not going to make a significant difference. |