Finally, an influential developer who cares about the other 99%.

I've lived in dozens of places. I've lived in urban areas, suburban areas, rural areas. I've even lived on a boat. With the exception of wealthy areas, reasonable internet is a constant struggle.

It's also never due to the speed though, in my experience. The biggest issues are always packet loss, intermittent outages, latency, and jitter. High speed internet doesn't count for much, aside checking off a box, if it goes out for a couple hours every few hours, or has 10% packet loss. You'd be surprised how common stuff like that is. Try visiting the domicile of someone who isn't rich and running mtr.

Another thing I've noticed ISPs doing is they seem to intentionally add things like jitter to latency-sensitive low-bandwidth connections like SSH, because they want people to buy business class. So, in many ways, 56k was better than modern high speed internet. Because yes, connections had slow throughput, but even with 300 baud the latency was fast and the reliability was good enough that you could count on it to be something you could actually use when connecting to a central computer and running vi. Bill Joy actually wrote vi on that kind of internet connection, which deeply influenced its design.

I had an ISDN connection at home in the mid 90's. In many ways, it felt faster than today's broadband because the web was still built for dial up. I later upgraded to an early cable modem sometime around 1998 (3 megabits, I think.) The web was still, very much, built for dialup and things felt incredibly fast. Despite having a connection orders of magnitude faster today, things feel far more bloated and sluggish. Bloated web sites are everywhere.

Just get a Ryzen CPU with business class gigabit internet and block display ads and third party cookies. The wild-eyed web frameworks and advertisements of our age were designed to consume the glut created by the cheapest silver status symbol, on which they now press the limits of not only bandwidth, but also CPUs and RAM too. For me I think it was around 2015 when I started feeling the heat of my Macbook scorching my legs each time I loaded a news website. I thought, oh my, am I being swept away by the performance tide already? So if your box is twice as fast as those things, then the modern web will feel fast. What's sad is most people aren't even granted that choice.

I have a fast computer, a ridiculously fast internet connection (10000/10000), and adblock. It still doesn't feel as fast as when I had @Home (10/1 I think?) in 1999.