I spent a week using only mobile Internet, and so should you

[Commentary] I spent a week tethering my computer to the mobile Internet connection on my phone. It was awful. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

It took people in rich countries several years to crawl from achingly slow dial-up connections (remember those?) to ISDN lines, to true broadband. It is by now conventional wisdom that the next billion (or two billion or five billion) people to come online will do so using smartphones and mobile broadband. Indeed, it is already happening.

Yet many of these new Internet users suffer from obstacles such as intermittent electricity supply, expensive data plans (compared to average local wages), a lack of local content or language support, outdated devices and weak or non-existent financial infrastructure. Worst of all, they must put up with achingly slow Internet connections. Anybody who cares about the Internet or wants to understand how it should evolve in the coming years would do well to understand how the vast majority of the world uses it, which I did.

In one week, I consumed 4 gigabytes of data, or about as much as a DVD holds. When I got back on (50Mbps!) broadband, I used 2 gigabytes in 24 hours. YouTube became a no-go zone. It worked, but loaded slowly and paused to buffer constantly. Spotify wasn’t great either, mostly because I was generally also trying to load other things for work at the same time. It quickly became clear that I was better off listening, on repeat, to the very few MP3s on my computer. Netflix, Hulu and iPlayer? I didn’t even try. They were slow enough with my previous connection -- top speed 14Mbps -- for me to know that there was no point. Mobile broadband, despite the name, simply isn’t up to scratch for the modern web.