how quickly can you download anything?
hint: speed not defined

"anything" is 8 chars. Assuming ASCII is the encoding: that means 8 bytes of content.

Assuming HTTP is the transport: the smallest theoretical request header is 26 bytes. (https://stackoverflow.com/questions...)

But because we're talking responses, lets just shoot for a size that you actually might see in the wild... say, 400bytes (https://stackoverflow.com/questions...)

Assuming average connection speed in the USA: which is 12.6Mbps (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) that means we could get speeds of up to 1.575 MegaBytes per second (ISPs advertise speeds in Megabits, `Mb` to fool consumers, `1MB` === `8Mb`)

then
(400 bytes + 8 bytes) = 408 byte response

408 bytes / 1.575 MB p/s = 259.047619 microseconds

That's how fast I can download "anything"

@rozzzly then you go again with the lowest possible which is dialup which the last I tried it was 2.5kbits so yeah