Just because I can.
But it also proves 2G is still at least somewhat usable.
I would just switch my phone to 2G only and then continue the download in Termux using wget because that’s most reliable way to download files.
I let it run overnight, then stop it when I needed my phone during the day, then let it run again at night when not needed anymore.
However, 2G is quite inefficient, so this actually drains the battery a lot.
I wonder if the carrier just sees a weird spike in 2G data usage.
Anyway, calculation time. Wikipedia Kiwix ZIM file is approximately 110GB. 109,886,078,976B to be precise. With average speed of say 21KB/s, it would take around 2 months to download the whole English Wikipedia with low res pictures over 2G EDGE.
But also EDGE is quite better than original GSM Data (CSD), which offered breathtaking 9600bps.
Imagine waiting all that time and then realizing somehow the hash is wrong, and having to get it again. Genuinely surprised to hear someone using 2G data, given 3G was phased out as is. Didn’t even realize you could. At an average of 21KB/s,
I genuinely had a faster internet connection with dial-up when I was a kid, which as I recall reached exciting speeds like 35KB/s sometimes.Misremembered, it averaged 35Kb/s, so it was significantly slower than 2G (4KB/s vs 21KB/s). It also made cool ass sounds when you connected, truly a marvelous experience.I think you’re mixing it up with Kb/s. Bits vs bytes. 21KB/s is 168Kb/s, which is faster than the fastest dial-up.
I know the difference, but I guess I just misremembered if it’s literally impossible. When I downloaded stuff it did tend to hang around 30-40 though, so if that is Kb/s instead, I guess my amazing speeds were actually a little over 4KB/s. I definitely for sure had dial-up though, we were on the AOL plan for quite a long time.
Also about:
At least in some countries around Europe, 3G was shutdown rather than 2G. It used up more bandwidth, and most devices can still fallback to 2G, plus at least in Slovakia 2G had superior coverage. Well, still has over 4G/5G.
Plus there’s a lot of 2G-only IoT devices like electric and gas meters, and those companies are less likely to upgrade than individual customers.
So far, only Orange plans to shutdown 2G, sometime around 2028. I’ve also seen an idea to keep one single 2G network that would be shared between all 4 carriers, which is an idea I quite like.
Remember, it’s also a fallback for modern devices when VoLTE/VoWiFi/VoNR doesn’t work.
Yeah if this was done over torrent it would have some more bandwidth overhead, but each chunk is hashed individually so a network failure would be relatively minor rather than trying to get the entire thing in one go