Facebook '2G Tuesdays' to better understand markets like India
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/iter...
http://blogs.technet.com/b/juanand/archive/2010/03/05/standa...
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For example, I cannot comprehend how you could get anywhere close to 250KB/s on 2G (which is approx. 2Mbit/s). Furthermore, most WiFi connections cannot get anywhere near 30MB/s (which is 240 Mbit/s).
Either that, or the UI is incorrectly using KB/s when they mean Kb/s (Kbit/s).
(This is especially noticeable if you're in a train or a bus where you're frequently changing cells.)
Unless I was in a city, I only had 2G signal, and in a few places I didn't even have that (but those were rare).
Edit: for reference, my carrier at the time was Simple Mobile, an MVNO of T-Mobile (I'm no longer with them anymore: I just activated Project Fi today).
My reference areas are Maryland,DC,VA (through NOVA and down to farming areas around Charlottesville); a weeklong road trip from Phoenix to Los Angeles with Las Vegas and Grand Canyon stops; and a month-long road trip going through VA-MD-PA-NY-NY-OH-IN-IL-WI-MN-SD-WY-MT-ID-WA-OR-CA.
I haven't seen 2G in a LONG time
Then I arrived in Edinburgh, and, bam, 4G -- which persisted back to Newbury and London.
In the US, particularly last decade, we felt that we had been left so far behind in mobile technology compared to Europe, but my coverage woes this last trip made me feel somewhat better-- as did the realization that roaming charges were still a thing in the EU (having assumed they must have gone away ages ago).
The best coverage I experienced was in Iceland, where even the most remote-seeming canyon had top-notch data service, and our apartment for the week had 50Mbps FTTH service.
On a slightly more recent trip to New Zealand, I went with Vodafone again, and had much better luck with coverage-- I only lost coverage on the west coast of the south island which did not surprise me given the remoteness.
The same is true about broadband speeds. It's widely believed, incorrectly so, that the US lags massively behind Europe on broadband. It's not true however, it's little more than a bogus bashing point spread around online. The US has comparable average broadband speeds to the UK and Denmark, and is faster than Germany, and far faster than France, Italy or Spain. [1]
[1] https://www.stateoftheinternet.com/resources-connectivity-20...
IMHO that's really strange...
Did something major happen between 2013 and 2014? Because otherwise I can't think of any reason that would double the average speed of a whole country with a population of over 300 million.
Having said that, Vodafone has a reputation for good 2G coverage, but I don't think that holds for 3G or 4G. It could also be a bit out of date.
https://www.vodafone.co.uk/explore/network/uk-coverage-map/
I think it's telling that Vodafone's 2G map shows the whole country, but the 3G and 4G maps are limited to a high zoom, so you don't get an overview.
The government regulator has a map which gives a fair comparison: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/mobile-coverage.
For anyone else doing something similar, EE would be the best choice.
It helped a us lot to improve our product for India market.
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151027_FV_1ATV/1/details/
I didn't get the idea that grk was pitching consulting services but just to be clear that I have no interest in that market, here are the most obvious things:
1. Enable gzip transfer compression for static assets like Bootstrap
2. Compress the large images more aggressively and perhaps turn on progressive JPEG, although that latter step might be CPU-costly on mobile devices
3. Set cache headers on all static resources so regular users and anyone behind a caching proxy will avoid the full server RTT
4. If you use www.hike.in, optimize the redirect to go directly to get.hike.in instead of having a full RTT to get the intermediate hike.in redirect.
Beyond that, I'd look into a front-end diet – do you need so many images, can you lazy-load images or that 350KB of youtube, etc?
It struck me as basically somebody saying "if you care about it for your app, I'd be happy to help you care about it for your website".
I feel like you're assuming bad faith, and the person confused as to why the comment was being downvoted was applying the principle of charity instead.
No SSL, No HTTP2/PageSpeed. Html not concated.
No additional server in america. It sucks to connect from Germany. It's twice as fast to connect to Servers in America so ALWAYS have a US Region.
I hope their messenger is better.
"Happy Dussehra! Join hike this weekend & get a festive bonus of Rs. 51 free talktime on joining. It's 5 times faster with 10 new features. http://hike.in"
I'm thinking of reporting this to relevant authorities.
Also, after the hike fiasco, I kept getting callbacks from many of my contacts that I had given them a missed calls.
Very shady. I don't even know how they do it. I thought it was illegal to pretend as another mobile number.
>Free Group Calls With Upto 100 People With The Tap Of A Single Button!
"Upto" should be two words
Today I found out my megacorp has been leading the charge to help me empathize with our customers in Africa. It's a sad day when my latency to the internet in Europe is higher than our actual satellite connection to a remote site in Africa.
:(.
First of all the app takes too much resources and makes the phone sluggish, especially on low end phones which are very common here. (Messenger is big offender here)
I believe one of the reasons why whatsapp became so popular was that it was faster to use than facebook's messenger and you could easily delete media to save storage.
People prefer using facebook on Opera Mini on their iPhones and android phones than using it from the app.
Whatsapp is just as bad. Disallowing it from running in the background extends my battery life from under a day to over 2 days. Why are these messaging apps so resource hungry?
Every app has to poll for new messages on their own. That means opening up a connection just to see if something new is there.
To give an analogy that's easy to grasp: imagine a giant sluice, big enough to fit two oil tankers. Opening a connection is like sending boats through it, the boats are the data, and the water is the power used each time. Now this sluice is a bit funny: once you operate it, it's very efficient and automatic, but it runs twenty times. In other words, you want have at least forty big-ass boats full of data to send through if you don't want to waste energy (to be clear, I just pulled these numbers out of the air; and in a real sluice that would be forty boats both ways, but internet connections are a bit different).
Now imagine you just send a teeny tiny boat checking for new messages each time. If there's a message, data will be sent back (other boats). If not, due to how 2/3/4G work, the sluice will still open and close forty times. That'a s LOT of wasted water. It also takes time to operate the sluice.
Not everyone who develops these apps is aware of this, so some naive app developers poll all the time.
What would be amazing if the phone OS provided some sort of batching system where these polling messages would queue up, and it would connect for all of them at once. I dunno, maybe the newer phones have something like that.
This handles all aspects of regular polling so that adding more messaging applications shouldn't negatively affect the battery performance. Instead the application should be alerted and awoken if a relevant message is pushed to the device.
It's not that hard to open a TCP connection, or heck, even a WebSocket. HTTP 1.1 is clearly the wrong application to use here.
Lack of accountability? All the complaints I hear about battery life are aimed at manufacturers, rather than the crap that we shovel on them and forget about. Facebook taking flak over their recent background audio problems was a rare exception.
Accountability comes with the functionality that allows you to see which apps are using battery. I recently upgraded to WP 10 and got a notification saying "some background apps are using a lot of battery," which is how I became aware of the culprit.
That notification is a very smart idea and I hope to see it at some point on Android/iPhone.
It got us lots of users (0.25B monthly actives) but they are (relatively speaking) quite poor, so ad revenues aren't as high as you might wish. So you need a lean operation, at least if your operating cost is significant - like transcoding web pages for 1/30th of the global population...
Edit: It seems to me that depending on the market one targets there's not much to be gained from designing for slow connection speeds...
For example, on my trip a few weeks ago, I used T-Mobile's free 2G roaming to get around. Searching for something on Google was pretty quick, and loading a Wikipedia page also was relatively fast. But the second I moved away from them and onto real sites that didn't try to optimize for lower speeds, I was pulling my hair out at how much data was trying to get sucked down on such a slow connection. It took minutes to load some websites.
Return visitors to your page/app/whatever?
Just because one is connected using Verizon, doesn't mean the connection speeds at any given time are all that great.
Otherwise, you might figure it out when you suddenly lose most of your users to a competitor who offers a snappier experience.
But its a often a low end phone with slow internet speeds.
If I remember correctly, one of Google's advantage over their competition in their early days was their page would load quickly on low end desktops and slow dial up connections.
Not only should app developers use slower internet speeds, they should be developing it for the low end smart phones- Which make up for most of people who are using smart phones.
Especially in a country like India, there are a lot of people using $20-$30 smartphones. Who make most of the users out there. Develop for them, and you get a huge user base for free.
https://code.facebook.com/posts/1556407321275493/building-fo...
[0]: https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/656582605173858305
Most don't stay with them for too long, though. It does really take an extra push to advance this. I had a Galaxy Young for two days after I cracked my normal phone's screen. It was kind of hellish.
I'm in the process of getting a local DNS server set up at home which will help some by blacklisting ad network IPs, but it won't help over the mobile network.
And I'd rather not pay for a cloud server to use as DNS when I'm on the road, plus I think Android will use Google's DNS server if other lookups fail. I discovered this when my parent's internet stopped working for their computer and their iPhone, but my Android worked fine. Their ISP DNS was offline.
I love uBlock Origin on the desktop and thanks to you now I have it on my tablet too!
If your phone is rooted, you can just set your /etc/hosts file to send requests to ad domains to /dev/null (figuratively). That's basically what Android ad blocker apps do.
If you're not rooted, you can use Firefox for Android, which lets you use extensions like uBlock and Ghostery[0] on your phone.
[0] not an adblocker, but related, and also helps speed up sites that load lots of crud
(Previously on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10224547 )
You might not want to use the service. Fine, then don't! Is your life any worse because it exists?
I try to avoid complaining about things which are free as in beer.
That's not what people said. People wanted all things on the internet to be treated as equal, also known popularly around the world as 'net neutrality'.
There is a very little difference between, offering something for free. And offering different services for different prices.
For eg: Indian Telcos have been longing to bill VoIP calls as regular calls.
I'd rather pay to access everything with a uniform quality of service, than get into differential pricing. Pushing your hidden agendas through this way should not be welcome.
But we are not going to pay extra money just to use a chat application over the internet, or make a VoIP call.
Thank, but no thanks.
I would prefer we rather stick with the net neutrality principles.
Facebook access isn't like Polio vaccination. Poor people in India worry more about food than Facebook/Internet access. Even if they were given internet access, Most don't know how to read and write. Those capable of spending around 2000 rupees on a smartphone(lower middle class) can also buy a pre paid internet pack for an affordable price. And already do.
If you want to see the real innovation happening in countries like India to make Internet accessible to every one look at : http://www.saankhyalabs.com/ Who are working towards using wasted tv bandwidth for internet.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Census_of_India#Literacy
This may seem like a trivial improvement, but it has caused the neighborhood to completely turn around. Everyone is amazed by how much better and safer the area has gotten. So I don't mind if Facebook's motives are ultimately profit-driven. People in developing countries could greatly benefit. It's win-win.
If they actually cared enough to want to help people, they would be trying to help with something that is actually needed. An AOL-style walled garden is a joke compared to vaccinations, food, and energy. Instead, we are seeing a modern variant of the East India Company trying to insert itself into foreign affairs. This is rent-seeking of the worst kind.
What makes the situation in India peculiar is not just the lack of 3G, but the variance within the band. It is not unusual to see "3G" connection with 15Kbs speeds.
A recent study, which I am unable to dig into at this moment, showed that the aggregate bandwidth of a 3G connection in India is only marginally (~18%) faster than a 2G connection.
The second challenge we encounter is "fake" connectivity - even though the phone shows 3G or 2G, it is not a guarantee that there exists a data network at all.
And yet another study found that more than half of the country did not get what upgrading to 3G meant. If and when the phone companies successfully win the mind share of this half and encourage them to switch over to 3G, the situation will deteriorate even further because of the load on the band.
A dated but an effective coverage of the situation - http://www.economist.com/node/10214756
Creating adaptive (and even offline apps, especially regulated financial industry apps) is super-challenging from a product point.
I will be glad to answer any other questions, related to this topic.
P.S - I have spent ~15 years in NYC and a few years in London and can empathize with the comments in this thread. But building mobile apps for India, takes a different thinking IMHO. We need to wear the hat of a microkernel / embedded systems developer from 8085 era.
Shameless Plug - we are hiring programmers / mathematicians to solve problems like this. If interested, please email me. ID in my profile.
I have stopped having any mobile data on my phone and mostly prefer WiFi, since I hate paying for such a limited internet.
[1]: http://www.ideacellular.com/idea/select-circle?PlanType=3Gne...
* Tether Your Phone Tuesdays
* Work from Home Tuesdays
* Fucking Stupid Idea Tuesdays
"I know, let's get a bunch of really smart people, and totally fuck over their productivity 20% of the time." Genius!
> When a Facebook employee logs into the app any Tuesday morning, they'll see a prompt at the top of their News Feed asking whether they want to try out the slower connection for an hour.
Websites have accumulated so much bloat while our speeds have gone up. Facebook loads the same for me now, on 20x greater speed than when I started using it and similar story can be told for other major websites.
<edit> Not sure why downvoted. Google has had hobbled networks like this for a long time, for exactly the same reason.