If I was lucky, the page started rendering 15-20 seconds after I sent the request.
I saw a lot of the server stopped responding over the course of a few days.
It wasnt just Wikipedia, either.
CNN International had similar load times.
So did Googles main search page.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
First, just consider the enormously constrained nature of satellite internet access.
If that all that distance were vacuum, your absolute floor for ping latency is about 506 milliseconds.
Thats just the time for the signals to make two round trips to geosynchronous orbit and back.
But thats not the real connection killer in most cases: packet loss is.
After all, these packets are going to orbit and back.
Lots of things along those long and lonely signal paths can cause the packets to get dropped.
50% packet loss is not uncommon; 80% is not unexpected.
That is reason enough to set up a local caching server.
Another, even more pressing reason is that pretty much all commercial satellite connections come with data caps.
Where I was, their cap was 50GB per month.
Beyond that, they could either pay overages, or just not have data until the next month.
And someone had, for the school where I was teaching.
Because Wikipedia wouldnt cache.
HTTPS, which by design prevents man-in-the-middle attacks, utterly breaks local caching servers.
So I kept waiting and waiting for remote resources, eating into that months data cap with every request.
If you define everyone as people with gigabit fiber access, sure.
Maybe its even true for most of those whose last mile is copper.
But for people beyond the reach of glass and wire, every word of that claim was wrong.
If this is a surprise to you, youre by no means alone.
Can we do anything?
I havent gotten one up for meyerweb yet, but I will do so very soon.
Thats great for modern browsers, but not everyone has the option to be modern.
Or on even older machines, running Windows 95 or other operating systems of that era.
Securing the web literally made it less accessible to many, many people around the world.
you’ve got the option to read the original article onmeyerweband follow meyerweb onTwitter.
