Just because I can.
But it also proves 2G is still at least somewhat usable.
I would just switch my phone to 2G only and then continue the download in Termux using wget because that’s most reliable way to download files.
I let it run overnight, then stop it when I needed my phone during the day, then let it run again at night when not needed anymore.
However, 2G is quite inefficient, so this actually drains the battery a lot.
I wonder if the carrier just sees a weird spike in 2G data usage.
Anyway, calculation time. Wikipedia Kiwix ZIM file is approximately 110GB. 109,886,078,976B to be precise. With average speed of say 21KB/s, it would take around 2 months to download the whole English Wikipedia with low res pictures over 2G EDGE.
But also EDGE is quite better than original GSM Data (CSD), which offered breathtaking 9600bps.
Yeah if this was done over torrent it would have some more bandwidth overhead, but each chunk is hashed individually so a network failure would be relatively minor rather than trying to get the entire thing in one go