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> The mobile web as a whole has gotten faster There are actually cases, were faster infrastructure had slowed down a system significantly. E.g., British railways (in various organisational form over the years) entertained rolling post office trains, which grabbed mail bags on the go, sorted the mail and dropped it again without any halts, since 1838. This played quite a role in the evolution of fast delivery of national news papers, up to 8 deliveries of mail per day in urban centers, etc. By the 1960s the procedure had become too dangerous for the increased speed of trains (with several firemen loosing their heads in accidents involving the scaffolds for handing over the mail bags) and the last Travelling Post Office ceased operations in 1971. Moral: by speeding up the network by a few miles per hours, mail delivery slowed down by a day. Similarly, as mobile network speeds increased, expectations what could be done with this rose faster than the actual speed of infrastructure. Add high-res resources with previously unheard of page loads and you've established a system of ever increasing expectations and visions, which will be always bound to significantly outclass the real life capabilities of the infrastructure. As long as we stick to this paradigm, increasing network speed will always result in a slower web, due the Wirth factor involved. I'm afraid this will be even more true for any further significant speed-ups, like those promised by a fully operational 5G network. (Also, visions and concept that are apt to exploit and even challenge the capabilities of 5G will probably also pose a new challenge to any hardware on the end points, which may prove eventually financially challenging for an average user, by this introducing yet another significant gap and respective drops in average real-world performance.) |