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.
I should note it’s not all about speed, but also latency. Even 256kbps on 2G EDGE is sluggish while 256kbps throttled 4G is pretty usable for web browsing.
Although it also depends on how the limiting is done. Some may allow some higher burst rate, some may limit to the speed with queue, some may just drop all packets above the speed.
I like this diagram from Cisco to visualize it:
Source: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/quality-of-service-qos/qos-policing/19645-policevsshape.html