The very slow lane. I returned from Austin a little over a week ago. Once here, I had to face the reality: I needed to use a dial-up connection to get online from home. Something I haven’t needed to do (at home) for almost five years since DSL was installed. Our office has high-speed wifi, as do the cafes I frequent. Even when traveling, many airports and hotels are now set up with a high-speed wireless network. So I seldom experience dial-up speeds.
A week before I left for SxSW, I asked SBC to upgrade my DSL connection to a faster speed. Since I had DSL installed soon after it was introduced, my account existed in some ancient database, disassociated with all the “modern” accounts created in the last few years, and was not changeable. I was told they’d need to disconnect my current service, terminate the account, then create a new account in the new system. And that all this would result in a 2-week disruption in service.
So I had them start the process while I was in Austin. This meant, upon return, that I’d only have about a week on dial-up at home. I looked at the situation as a temporary minor inconvenience which would remind me what the online experience is like for millions of home users.
Throughout the period of crawling connection speeds, I noticed a few acute differences between broadband and dial-up. My experience, expectations, and the tasks I attempted varied immensely. The differences I noticed when going back to dial-up for a week:
- Group tasks together. Broadband connections are always on, so there’s no hesitation in using the internet for small, quick tasks that can be accomplished immediately. With dial-up, I hesitate, and wonder if I really need to do the task now, or if it can wait and be grouped with other tasks when I connect later.
- Avoid links. With a broadband connection, I don’t think twice about following a link that appears slightly interesting. Clicking around on a site to find what I’m looking for is usually just a minor inconvenience. With dial-up, I avoid clicking as much as I can, and am always trying to think of the shortest possible path.
- Revive the Yellow Pages. With a fast connection, the Web is effectively a replacement for Yellow Pages. Need an address for a store or restaurant? Pull it up online. I’ll have hours, a map, and directions faster than I’d be able to make a phone call and write down the information. With dial-up, I’d never think about going through the trouble of connecting just to get a phone number or an address of a business.
- Comparison shop less. On dial-up, comparison shopping takes tedious amounts of time. I hit fewer sites, click through fewer reviews, and am less likely to start a process I know I’m not likely to finish. With faster connections, I’ll often have multiple windows or tabs open at once, each with different products or competing sites displaying relative information.
- Sing praises of RSS/Atom. News readers are invaluable for saving time on dial-up connections. There’s no way I’d hit all the sites I like to frequent without a fast connection. Getting updates via XML means I can get a quick survey of all the day’s (or hour’s) content without hitting each one individually. Again, I carefully choose which links I follow. With broadband, if I only see a summary, I’ll often follow the link to the site.
- Yell at error pages. Server errors or missing pages annoy the heck out of me when I’m on a dial-up connection. If I’ve invested significant time in getting to where I’ve finally gotten, errors on the site I’m visiting are much more costly. On broadband, I brush it off, and move on.
- Avoid email attachments. Unless it’s a small text file, I’m much less likely to tell anyone I’ll send it to them via email. Last week, I was sending files back and forth with a client. When a simple attachment takes 10 minutes to send, and the client IM’s you with another change while the first file is still sending, you think twice about using email attachments. And you curse your friend’s uncle, who insists on sending the body of every one of his joke-of-the-week email messages in an attached Word file.
- Suffer through online banking. Online banking is a much more pleasant experience when you can get tasks accomplished in under a minute. Get in, get it done, get out. Dial-up online banking makes me want to go back to paper and pencil record keeping.
- Forget music downloads. After five years on DSL, there’s not a chance in hell that I’m going to wait 30 minutes for a 4MB file. Friends’ bands sites with new clips available? Exploring indie music sounds? Related bands? iTunes Music Store? Forget all of them on dial-up. Same goes for video news clips. They’re not worth the wait.
- Surf fewer images. Upon returning from SxSW, everyone started posting photos from Austin. Browsing through image galleries is not as instantly rewarding on dial-up, so I tend to look through less photos, and have less patience for wading through pages of thumbnails to find the interesting shots.
- Admit that tabbed browsing is it. Even more true than when surfing with high-speed connections, when on dial-up, tabs enable me to pop open a bunch of links in other tabs, and let them load in the background while I’m reading/using the current page. Tabbed-browsing is a welcome addition to browser feature sets, whether on dial-up or broadband, even if the tabs are used for different purposes in each environment.
I’ve taken for granted these differences. Only when I’m forced to do something a new way do I recognize the variances in habits, routines, and expectations when it comes to living and working online. It’s sort of like being thrown back in time, taking with me the invisible knowledge of what’s possible today. High-speed access — and now, prevalent wireless high-speed access — is changing our use of the Web and our lives in ways that aren’t always immediately obvious.
Note: This original entry was accidently deleted from the database, due to a Safari/MT evil caching problem. I was able to grab the text of the entry and all the comments before republishing. But comments 1-19 had to be re-entered manually, so their post dates/times are no longer accurate.
24 comments
Jason Fried 5 years ago
Great points, Doug. Goes to show “speed” means more than just “load time” — it means experience. It’s easy to clock pages and wonder if they are “fast enough” but that ignores the entire experience. It’s rare that you’ll find everything you need on a single page, so the slowness and frustration piles up fast on a slow connection.
Tom 5 years ago
Great insight - things to remember while designing UIs. One thing I can wholeheartedly agree on - tabbed browsing IS it. I love FireFox and I use the tabs so much now I don’t know how I got along without them. Now I hate using IE if only for that reason!
Jeff Minard 5 years ago
Tell me, from your experience using dialup, did sites that used CSS/XHTML layout work noticeably better for you? Getting at a point - is all the separation worth it from the stand point of file size reduction?
Ryan Brill 5 years ago
Once you’ve been on DSL (or any other high speed internet), you forget just how much of a pain dial-up really is. I’m reminded how nice DSL is when I’m working on a client’s computer that still is on dial-up.
Hope it gets resolved quickly, and you’re “up to speed” soon. ;)
nathan 5 years ago
In what universe is it acceptable to have no service for two weeks, just so you have the priveledge of giving SBC more money? If cable broadband is available in your area, drop your landline and go the cellphone/cable modem route.
ak 5 years ago
welcome to my world..
today i went to a friends house and downloaded over 200mb’s in less than an hour. i’m still not convinced this isn’t magic.. less than half of that would have taken me 39hrs.
Travis Cripps 5 years ago
I’m totally with you on all these points. I guess misery loves company.
I live in a dead spot right now (in the middle of Silicon Valley!)and I’ve been extremely frustrated for the last few months of no high speed access. Now, I can’t wait until my lease is up and I can move. I’ll never move again before I have confirmation that some form of broadband access is available in the location under consideration.
I hope SBC really comes through for you in the promised timeframe.
Frustrated in Silicon Valley.
Nakijo 5 years ago
Can you explain your tabbed browser comments to me? I’ve been using Firefox since it came out and I still don’t get it…
Surely the new pages take just as long to load if I load them in a new tab as in a new window?
I don’t use tabs at all. They just confuse my keyboard shortcut habits. Are there keyboard shortcuts for tabs that are equivalent to Shift and Alt-Tab? Firefox help and forums remain totally quiet on the subject…
(Sorry, if this is too OT, but hey, I’ve never posted a comment on anyone’s site before, I’m not exactly down with the etiquette)
Nils Devine 5 years ago
The key commands you’re looking for are Ctrl and Ctrl-Tab. Hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab, hold Ctrl and hit Tab to switch between tabs.
The idea behind letting pages load in the background is that once you have one page loaded you never have to sit and wait until another page loads. While you are reading one page you Ctrl click a link to load another page in the background. Then you just go on reading the page you are on. By the time you’re done reading the next page will have loaded.
The slow connections use of tabbed browsing is on my list of positive reasons to switch. It’s easy enough to explain how evil and insecure IE is, but to really get quality converts we need to give people positive reasons to switch to an alternative browser.
Raena Armitage 5 years ago
‘I was told they’d need to disconnect my current service, terminate the account, then create a new account in the new system.’
Pig’s arse they need to. I can’t believe your phone companies can get away with this garbage… it’s like ‘locking’ phones to networks.
Nakijo 5 years ago
Thanks, Nils. I’ll try it with the shortcuts. Your description of the use puzzles me though - that’s exactly what I do now, so I don’t see how having a tab rather then a new window saves me much. Just one of those things, I guess, all part of the ‘Change Browser/Platform/OS’ mythology
William Wedler 5 years ago
I use dial-up at home and broadband at school. The differences are tremendous. I never even heard of half of the video clips and other features mentioned.
Using explorer, I sometimes have so many browsers open at once that it is difficult to use other applications. I started using Mozilla, and the tabs are great (and it has better support for CSS). I could never use Netscape though. Too many bad memories.
One more difference is that I use the back button much less when I’m using dial-up. Sorting through search results is tricky and if go to a site I don’t want, closing the window is faster than using the back button.
Jeff Minard 5 years ago
Nakijo - There is no diff behind the “new tab”/”new window” - well, not as far as load times are concerend. Tab browsing just helps to keep the task bar cleaner. I have (right this second) 28 tabs open…I would die if I had 28 browser icons in my task bar. :-P
Aleksandar Vacia 5 years ago
It can also show you that fewer links in the HEAD part of your page results in much lower content-show times.
While you are on dial-up (and if you have time), create a mockup page for Stopdesign - one where all screen styles are inserted into one file and the other where you have your current situation (with additional imports in the screen.css).
Start with empty browser cache, and measure times for 1st load and subsequent loads (with .css and .js already in cache). Then try it in normal browsing circumstances, when you are not loading only one web site, but have several streams sharing those (effective) 50k.
It creates significant difference, one which I am painfully aware when surfing from home on 28.8k or 33.6k connection.
Lea de Groot 5 years ago
We were on dialup for over 5 years until several months ago when we moved, and, Yep, I have to agree with almost all those points - my main differential is that we got a second line dedicated to the dialup and just left it on all the time. No issues here of ’should I do this now or later?’
Yes, we had to do a bit of ISP shopping to find one where the auto-redial was acceptable (or did we find one that was so incompetent that they didnt notice? Not sure :), but we were online 24×7 on dialup - heck we were serving websites over it (carefully designed for low bandwidth, mind you, but served, nonetheless :)
KillAllDash9 5 years ago
I feel your pain–I really do. I’ve been using either ADSL or cable broadband for the last 4 years; the last year of which has been on a 3Mb/s connection. Now, due to some temporary financial trouble, we’ve had to drop our cable connection (broadband _and_ TV–ouch!) for a while and have gone back to a dialup connection. It was a sad day in geek-land when I realized that I can once again tell exactly what speed I’m going to connect at by the sound of the modem training up.
On the other hand, I tend to use the computer a _lot_ less at home, now–preffering to save the majority of my surfing for the office where I still have a high-speed connection.
dickwood 5 years ago
One good thing about SBC DSL is that you can renegotiate your contract every year. I have the Standard Plus package, which usually goes for $49.95. I pay $29.95. All you have to do is call before your contract expires and say you would like to retain their services but you do not want to pay more than you currently paying.
I wish other companies worked the same way.
Scott Johnson 5 years ago
I, too, have had high-speed connections for quite some time. And tabbed-browsing has just made these connections seem even faster. I can’t imagine ever going back to an IE-style tabless browser. On the rare occasion that I’m forced to use a dialup connection, I appreciate the tabs even more. But they’re really nice for broadband, too. It’s almost as if there’s NO page load time.
Chris from Scottsdale 5 years ago
Hi everybody. For tabbed browsing using the IE engine on Windows I am using MyIE2 which is awesome! I would recommend it to anybody who wants to use IE yet wants tabbed browsing AND wants to be able to use the Google toolbar.
Nick Finck 5 years ago
Poor Doug, you sound like you are in bandwidth hell. I think you forgot one tip: don’t step on the phoneline, it causes the signal to slow down. ;)
Sage 5 years ago
It’s uncanny how incredibly true this post is. I’ve been a dial-up user for 5 years or so now, and I know we won’t be getting broadband until at least another 2 years.
It’s not necessarily awful… using all of those tips mentioned above, it’s tolerable, though downloading anything >500KB has to be pre-planned (I usually start a large download right before dinner or taking a shower).
One great boon for dial-up users on the Apple side is that now Apple has built in the ability to re-connect downloads after stopping them manually or after a disconnection, so now I’ll never lose a download again. :-)
Heath Weaver 5 years ago
I posted similar comments on my blog and Jeffrey Veen’s blog.
I think it is really valuable for designers and other professionals to ’step in other’s shoes’ so to speak.
This came to me when I downloaded a text reader on a trial basis from IBM and realized how committed a person with site disabilities must be to venture on the web. Total disaster for me.
It certainly has had an impact on how I will design in the future and I wish everyone with a web page would give it a try (especially news and major content sites).
Rob 5 years ago
Dial-up sucks. Unfortunately, I won’t have broadband in my area for a while. The reason is they want to get the dense population centers first. I suspect now that everyone in those areas that wants broadband access has it.
renish 5 years ago
every designer should take care about above point. really great points.