> You'd get some plans that would drop down to 2G, but try using that for Google Maps when you're trying to find a bus to get you across the city.
Sure, I'll do my best to try it. I'll approximate the throttle by limiting chrome to 128kbps, 500ms delay, and 5% packet loss for fun.
With a fresh incognito session, google responds to "here to 4th street" in 10 seconds, and when I click to open maps it needs just under two minutes to load. Then I can click on the transit option and it needs another 10 seconds to update.
Not too bad for a cold cache. If I do it again with a hot cache it only takes 20 seconds to go through the whole process. And I expect the app to be similar to the hot cache situation. Even with 64kbps I'd expect reasonable results. Do any cell providers throttle worse than that?
I agree with your argument about bloat in general, but google in particular has a lot of good engineering resources and tries to work well on bad connections.
Also I would be in favor of some spectrum licensing rules that say you can't throttle below 1Mbps...
