before the advent of 4g,i was stuck with bsnl broadband with its paltry download speeds of upto 200 kbps(yes,even in this day and age their premium plans costing upto 1k per month offer such pathetic speeds)-and their connection broke down every few weeks/days and was a pain to get fixed.Bsnl's employees were notoriously rude and demanded bribes even for fixing basic problems like severed phone cables(which they are supposed to do for free).
frustrated,i stopped using bsnl for good and moved to mobile internet-although its quite restrictive in terms of the amount of data i can use during day times,the speeds are much better and the connection is also a lot more stable.Earlier while using tools like Gmeet the connection speeds dropped and i got kicked out of meetings every so often-now it happens very rarely.
prior to that ,when i had bsnl,i used to wait 2-3 days to download large files of upto 3-4 gbs or more-it was a very frustrating experience to say the least.Even downloading a 1gb movie from warez sites took around 2-3 hrs.
the situation was even worse in the early days of bsnl when it offered much slower speeds,i think in the beginning it was 25kbps,then it increased to 50 kbps,followed by 100 kbps then finally ending with 200 kbps.And bsnl used to trumpet its "Supposed" faster download speeds in newspaper adverts and portrayed it like some kind of a divine gift from the almighty! And people lapped it up too,as better options were not easy to come by in those days.
Many of my friends who lived in city areas ditched bsnl and got cable internet,which offered much faster download and browsing speeds,but i was stuck with bsnl for a long time as cable was not available at our place.And the 3g phones of yesteryears were also pretty slow and unreliable-very frequently the speeds reduced to 2g(edge) while browsing,and sometimes the network strengths dropped so low that internet stopped working altogether.
Suffice it to say that we have come a long way since then.