Engineering for Slow Internet

If you’re an app developer reading this, can you tell me, off the top of your head, how your app behaves on a link with 40 kbps available bandwidth, 1,000 ms latency, occasional jitter of up to 2,000 ms, packet loss of 10%, and a complete 15-second connectivity dropout every few minutes?

It’s probably not great! And yet – these are real-world performance parameters that I encountered, under certain conditions, at the South Pole. It’s normally better than this, but this does occur, and it occurs often enough that it’s worth taking seriously.

Source: Engineering for Slow Internet