Are we obsessed with speed?

[breadnatty08]

This is been discussed slightly in another thread, but I'm wondering how AT&T's campaign championing how fast their network is vs. VZW is valid? Have we become a society where 20 seconds is a lifetime? If you can upload a video or find the stats of a game 30 sec faster than your friend, are you cool, a winner, better?
Where do we draw the line? I'm pretty young, but I do remember the days of logging on to AOL and waiting upwards of 20min because it had to keep redialing. I had a book in hand and was okay. I lived. Now, we need everything instantaneously. AF was having some issues a week or so ago and pages were taking FOREVER (read: 30 sec) to load on my laptop and I was about to throw the thing against the wall. Am I crazy?
Just curious on folks' thoughts with how fast they need their info, their internet connection etc.

 

[AntimonyER]

How much better would it be if browsing were instant? You can know it probably adds up to 100+ hours a year we spend waiting for a page to load. To get that time back is always a good thing, so let them compete on speed until it is instant, thats my opinion

 

[SUroot]

I had an annoying email that resulted in a service desk ticket being re opened. I answered the email on my phone on my way home on the train.

I'm on leave for a week so don't want my stats messed up. I had to painfully vpn in on my phone, navigate the web based service desk interface and close the ticket. It seemed to take forever and I was panicked because I knew the train tunnel was coming up which would cut off my ssl vpn and would have to start from scratch.

Sure, I'm hsdpa but it was painful compared to the gigabit LAN at work. A little extra speed would have made the entire process much less frustrating

 

[Demache]

I don't really crave speed as much as bandwidth. They are somewhat related though.

On Verizon 3G, I often had to wait a while for a song to buffer over Google Music, and Youtube videos took a small lifetime to load (a minute for 30 seconds, yikes). It was definitely painful for anything but non-image heavy webpages.

Then LTE came along and now even "slow" 4G does circles around "fast" 3G. So yes I do crave a bit of speed.

 

[!on]

In many cases having "unlimited" data goes hand in hand with uncapped speed. In mobile broadband, you're likely to have less speed on a daily tariff than say a weekly or monthly plan. We just expect our monthly internet to be good enough! That said, my broadband operator gave even faster speeds, not that I noticed.

I also don't get the whole browser speed wars. When I ask for "best browser" I mean in terms of security, UI, add-ons & compatibility. Who cares if this browser launches 0.0005 seconds faster, I might use a 3g dongle later, so that argument goes out the window.

 

[SUroot]

In many cases having "unlimited" data goes hand in hand with uncapped speed. In mobile broadband, you're likely to have less speed on a daily tariff than say a weekly or monthly plan.

Not in my country. You get the speed you pay for for home broadband. You get the speed your mobile carrier's network can handle for Mobile phones.