Let's be honest, who here doesn't have always online broadband/ fibre/cable? I can understand if people have intermittent connectivity issues, but to have no internet at all? That's not so common now.
What I do hope is that the system mitigates intermittent connectivity issues and is able to precache some functions of the game for when it goes offline.
From what I have noticed already, there are a lot of functions that are server sided. One that I noticed recently was refining.
When the server was playing up, I was mining. Picked up a chunk of material and the cargo thing was stuck on processing.
Then at the top left, it came up with a message with something along the lines of that the Refinery couldn't connect to some server.
It's quite shocking that even the refining itself (which I don't think should be server sided) is server sided. I don't see how refining is dynamic in anyway, when it just calculates percentages of materials.
Another issue is this - with the networking system currently in place, if you're flying in an instance with someone else with poor networking (whether it's slower ADSL, or 3G, or they're playing over wifi and someone else in the house turns the microwave on), it seems that your play experience can be impacted by their networking blips. It's not just about whether you have a stable internet connection; it's about whether everyone / everything else in your instance does too, including the servers.
I can't say I've played 3.05 much, but in the versions I've played since premium beta started up to 3.04, there have been frequent problems when attempting to communicate with the server, whether it's been in joining the game at the start, entering / leaving supercruise, buying ships, or buying / selling commodities on the market. I hadn't realised the mining refineries did that too.
(Talking of mining, it seems very odd that the asteroids run out of resources so quickly, given how huge they are; it's even more odd that they restock when you supercruise out and back in again)
I hope they're increasing the resilience of these checks to cope with intermittent networking, whether it's your own home network, the other players in the instance, or the servers themselves. I suspect they might have put these server-side checks in place to mitigate the concerns of people who thought solo-online players would find a way of cheating, rack up loads of cash, then pull their characters into open play. Given offline play is no longer on the cards, Frontier need to double down and improve the resiliency of their servers and netcode.