Why slow internet is bad for your health

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

A video that suddenly stops due to problems with the Internet can infuriate anyone. But irritation and spoiled mood are not the worst. It turns out that poor communication can cause health problems.

Slow internet annoys everyone. And even more so when watching a video. Ericsson's engineers are no different from the rest in this respect, and therefore they decided to investigate the effect of stagnant video on users. First of all, scientists were interested in how the behavior of potential buyers is changing.

As it turns out, the stress of trying to download a video while using low-speed mobile internet is comparable to the stress of watching a horror movie.

The experiment, by the Swedes, was called Stress of Streaming Delays. The researchers filmed the encephalogram and cardiogram of the subjects while watching videos using the mobile Internet. The latency of the video stream increased the heart rate by 38%. And the repeated delay caused by buffering doubled the stress level. Thus, the person experienced the strongest emotional stress, which negatively affected both the nervous system and the heart. This is quite comparable to an exhausting run, but only for the latter a person can be prepared, and the slow Internet will annoy everyone. True, this applies to short delays.

When researchers looked at people whose video was frozen for more than six seconds, they found that their stress levels rose and fell. As a result, these participants showed non-verbal signs that they no longer wanted to watch the current material, and began to be distracted by something else.

The research results can be found. But you yourself know that if an episode of your favorite series hangs a couple of times due to connection problems, the desire to watch it disappears.

In general, you should not suffer from low speed and injure your own psyche. On Android, you can use one of the apps we have described to save traffic. The methods needed to speed up the Internet also exist for desktops. And in the end, there is always Opera with its efficient compression algorithms and ways to enable similar functionality in Chrome.