September 25, 2026 · by David Gilbert · 3 min read · Flashback Friday
Early broadband internet was genuinely marketed and sold as "high speed," at numbers that would feel almost comically, unusably slow by today's standards. It's a genuinely good reminder of how completely and gradually our baseline expectations shift, often without anyone consciously noticing the shift happening in real time as it unfolds.
What "High Speed" Actually Meant at the Time
Early broadband connections, genuinely marketed proudly as a dramatic, exciting upgrade from dial-up, ran at speeds that today wouldn't comfortably stream a single video without constant, frustrating buffering. At the time, the actual comparison point was dial-up, and against that specific baseline, it genuinely felt remarkably, dramatically fast. Speed, like most things, is fundamentally relative to whatever you're directly comparing it against in the moment.
What You Could Actually Do With It
Web pages loaded in a few seconds rather than agonising minutes. Downloading a single song was viable within a single sitting rather than requiring genuine, extended patience and prayer that nobody picked up the shared phone line midway through. Streaming video, in any genuinely usable, watchable form, was still years away for most ordinary households, regardless of how proudly "high speed" your particular connection was being marketed at the time.
Why the Marketing Wasn't Actually Dishonest
Relative to dial-up, it genuinely was dramatically, meaningfully faster, and the marketing reflected a completely real, significant improvement over the only realistic alternative available to most households at the time. It's only "high speed" looking faintly absurd in hindsight because our baseline expectation of normal internet speed has shifted so dramatically since, not because the original claim was ever dishonest relative to its own actual era and context.
How Fast the Bar Kept Moving After That
Each subsequent generation of "fast" internet felt remarkable and exciting at launch and then, within a handful of years, felt completely standard, unremarkable, and eventually frustratingly slow by the next generation's comparison point. We've been on this exact same treadmill for the internet's entire commercial existence, and there's genuinely no obvious reason at all to think it stops anytime particularly soon.
Why This Matters Beyond Simple Nostalgia
I think about this pattern constantly when clients ask whether their current website or systems are "fast enough." Fast enough compared to what, exactly, and fast enough for how long, realistically, before the baseline shifts again the way it reliably always has? Building only for today's comfortably acceptable baseline, with no margin or consideration for where that baseline is clearly heading next, is a genuinely common and avoidable mistake.
The Bigger Lesson About Expectations Generally
Almost every "this is genuinely impressive and fast" claim about technology has a relatively short shelf life before it quietly becomes "this is fine, I suppose" and then, eventually, "this is honestly frustrating now." That's not really a criticism of any specific technology at any specific point along that curve — it's simply the completely normal, expected shape of how technological expectations evolve over time, and "high speed" broadband from years back is about as clean and clear an example of that shape as you'll find anywhere.
What I'd Tell Anyone Building Something Today
Build comfortably ahead of today's baseline where you reasonably can, because today's perfectly comfortable, acceptable standard is reliably tomorrow's frustrating, dated bottleneck, the same way today's modern smartphone will eventually look as charmingly basic as that early "high speed" connection looks to us now from this current vantage point.