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Facebook '2G Tuesdays' to better understand markets like India

businessinsider.com

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Re: Facebook '2G Tuesdays' to better understand markets like India

#51

Post by amyjess »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #48

Do Facebookers never venture outside of cities? Because maybe the UK is weird, but getting 2G even in developed areas isn't that uncommon for me. Sure there's 4G in cities and 3G in many places, but there's plenty of places with poor signal or outdated transmitters (like the town I live in). (This is especially noticeable if you're in a train or a bus where you're frequently changing cells.)

I'm American, and I took a road trip last month from Dallas to NYC and back (going through Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and tiny bits of a few other states).

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).

Re: Facebook '2G Tuesdays' to better understand markets like India

#52

Post by carb »

kamaal wrote: post #36
sliverstorm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well sure, people wanted more. Facebook offered something for free, and people said "that's not enough, I want more for free!". Not a new story. 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.

>>people said "that's not enough, I want more for free!" 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 rat…

Who is going to pay for the uniform access to everything you want?

Re: Facebook '2G Tuesdays' to better understand markets like India

#53

Post by babuskov »

plonh wrote: post #34

Is everyone at FB so young that they don't remember 2G in America?

Even if you aren't young or don't work at FB. I remember how 2G was, but if you asked me to estimate how fast would any modern website work on it I wouldn't have a clue. Except maybe for HN which I would expect to work fast.

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.

Re: Facebook '2G Tuesdays' to better understand markets like India

#54

Post by sp332 »

kale wrote: post #45
Animats wrote: post #33

Ad blocking will improve response times on slow links by about 50%. More for really bad sites.

How can I improve this on my phone? I have ad blocking and flash blocking on my laptop, which speeds it up considerably. On my phone which is slower, lower memory, more battery sensitive, and data capped (so ads are a bigger nuisance), I can't find a solution that works on and off WiFi. 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 he…

Firefox for Android supports many addons, including uBlock Origin, Ghostery, HTTPS Everywhere, NoScript, etc. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/

Re: Facebook '2G Tuesdays' to better understand markets like India

#55

Post by chimeracoder »

kale wrote: post #45
Animats wrote: post #33

Ad blocking will improve response times on slow links by about 50%. More for really bad sites.

How can I improve this on my phone? I have ad blocking and flash blocking on my laptop, which speeds it up considerably. On my phone which is slower, lower memory, more battery sensitive, and data capped (so ads are a bigger nuisance), I can't find a solution that works on and off WiFi. 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 he…

> 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.

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

Re: Facebook '2G Tuesdays' to better understand markets like India

#56

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

amyjess wrote: post #51
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #48

Do Facebookers never venture outside of cities? Because maybe the UK is weird, but getting 2G even in developed areas isn't that uncommon for me. Sure there's 4G in cities and 3G in many places, but there's plenty of places with poor signal or outdated transmitters (like the town I live in). (This is especially noticeable if you're in a train or a bus where you're frequently changing cells.)

I'm American, and I took a road trip last month from Dallas to NYC and back (going through Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and tiny bits of a few other states). 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…

Every time I've taken a train in the UK (between Aberdeen and Edinburgh or Glasgow, or from Edinburgh to Manchester) this has been my experience. When you're sat in the station in a city you get 4G, it rapidly deteriorates to 3G after you set off, then 2G, and then it just alternates between 2G and nothing.

Re: Facebook '2G Tuesdays' to better understand markets like India

#58

Post by EastLondonCoder »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #48

Do Facebookers never venture outside of cities? Because maybe the UK is weird, but getting 2G even in developed areas isn't that uncommon for me. Sure there's 4G in cities and 3G in many places, but there's plenty of places with poor signal or outdated transmitters (like the town I live in). (This is especially noticeable if you're in a train or a bus where you're frequently changing cells.)

I find taking the overground in London quite good for testing real download speed for mobile web applications, rapidly switching cell towers with some of them not even running gprs

Re: Facebook '2G Tuesdays' to better understand markets like India

#59

Post by kamaal »

tsunamifury wrote: post #15
delinka wrote: post #11

Every software shop in the world should be designing and coding for low connectivity speeds.

No every software shop in the world should be designing to the requirements of their target userbase -- which often is not India.

>>which often is not India.

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.

Re: Facebook '2G Tuesdays' to better understand markets like India

#60

Post by kuschku »

_delirium wrote: post #7

This would help me too, as a first-worlder: I often use T-mobile's free global data roaming, which is super-nice to have, but capped to 2G speeds (128kbps). It becomes quite clear that some sites' designers have never tested their functionality at 128kbps...

Especially sites that hide content until all CSS and fonts are loaded... SO ANNOYING.
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