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Even myself from the 2000s would be amazed by the bandwidth that we can muster today. I am just old enough to remember waiting all day to download an IE update over dial up, and I'm definitely old enough to remember a 700MB torrent taking a whole day to download. Now I download and install a 100GB game from Steam in half an hour.

But in that same time, where bandwidth available to me has gone from <100 kbps to >1 gbps, ping has only gone from ~100ms to ~10ms.

The legacy telephone system was actually pretty good at latency, as long as you didn't end up on a crappy GEO satellite link, which dial up never would. After all, voice is actually a pretty latency sensitive application.

That said, our older ancestors would indeed be amazed at sub-second communications. Heck, even airmail latencies would seem insane to someone from before the first world war.



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