I hit 5GB of cell data for the first time. That’s how much I get per month before they throttle my connection. I switched to using cell service for home internet in April, and had managed to stay under 5GB until this last period.
Boy was it slow. It ranged from mildly painfully slow to timing out before loading anything.
Even search results and text articles would struggle to load and time out sometimes. It showed me how much I’ve gotten used to being able to look up anything whenever I want. I didn’t even attempt heavier things like video, audio, many web development things, app updates.
It really showed the weight of sites. It emphasized the importance of performance in web development. I really liked mobile Twitter allowing me to only load a blurred version of images and have a button with the file size so I could decide if I wanted to load the full image. Some article sites also had blurred images when JS was turned off. They didn’t have the size and link, but oftentimes I got enough out of the blurred image and description to be satisfied. I liked Ars Technica having comments loaded via a link rather than directly on the article page. I liked sites that showed me their content without a lot of superfluous stuff. I liked text over images. I liked sites that worked without JS. Most of these are things I like and use normally, but especially in those circumstances. This experience may influence my development in the future.
Not really sure how I went over the limit. It was only a few days before that I got a 4GB warning, and I had limited my usage after that. I guess the sites I was visiting must’ve been heavier than I thought.
Luckily I only dealt with this for four or five days. I will have to be more careful in the future.