Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 166 posts

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

#151

Post by TeMPOraL »

kogepathic wrote: post #13

Cue corporate IT departments everywhere advertising the slow internet speeds as "We are helping you empathize with the developing world" 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.

Be happy that you have access to Internet in Europe. I'm sitting in an international corporation's office in Shenzhen, China, and I have to do absurd amounts of dancing with VPNs to be able to leave a message for my family. Oh, and I have to do it on my own mobile connection, because no way a VPN over corporate network will last more than 30 seconds.

:(.

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

#152

Post by aembleton »

vanderZwan wrote: post #144
zamalek wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whatsapp 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?

I know all of this thanks to an old lecture I once attended (not a phone dev), so my information might be a bit off and outdated, but in broad strokes: it's partially due to naive programming practices, but phone manufacturers are also somewhat to blame. 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 gras…

I think developers of large apps such as Whatsapp will be aware of this and will be aware of Google Cloud Messaging: https://developers.google.com/cloud-messaging/

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.

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

#153

Post by kruczek »

stuaxo wrote: post #84
xixi77 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in Chicago, and it is not uncommon to see the connection (AT&T in this case) drop all the way to Edge inside buildings.

For ages I thought 'E' meant emergency, like it was some sort of backup connection for emergencies that didn't really work at all... this was back in 2008.

Uh, I thought it meant 'error'.. Only now I realize that it's referring to connection type.

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

#154

Post by zamalek »

vanderZwan wrote: post #144
zamalek wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whatsapp 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?

I know all of this thanks to an old lecture I once attended (not a phone dev), so my information might be a bit off and outdated, but in broad strokes: it's partially due to naive programming practices, but phone manufacturers are also somewhat to blame. 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 gras…

There's a very informative XMPP XEP[1] with mobile considerations that touches on what you said (although that analogy of yours is great!). Where my problem lies is: even if I was the cleaner at Whatsapp or FB I'd be making noise about battery life, I'd do everything I could. Put another way: I struggle to understand how a company that is about mobile doesn't put being a good mobile citizen first and foremost.

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.

[1]: http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0286.html#power

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

#155

Post by georgerobinson »

minimaxir wrote: post #42

It's worth noting that Chrome has a Device Emulation feature, which allows you to throttle connection speed to common presets such as EDGE/2G/3G/etc. It makes testing mobile layouts easier, at the least. https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/iter...

Maybe it's just me, but aren't the presets on Chrome extraordinarily over-optimistic?

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).

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

#156

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

A010 wrote: post #98
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.)

In Vietnam, there are more and more buses have 3G router w/ AP to supply internet to their customers on road trips. Even the remote mountains now have stable 3G network.

Yes, we visited Vietnam last year (beautiful country by the way, well worth a visit) and were surprised to get solid 3G coverage even out in the middle of Ha Long Bay!

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

#157

Post by kale »

sp332 wrote: post #54
kale wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Thanks for this! Firefox runs great on my phone, and this is an older phone that is also throttled for battery life.

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

#158

Post by bhups »

mangamadaiyan wrote: post #106
bhups wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't about you , though. It's about the millions of people who can't afford to pay.

Well, yes. Except, internet access isn't going to be the first problem they'd want to solve (or be solved).

That's fine, but providing internet access doesn't preclude others from solving other important (or perceivably more important) problems.

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

#159

Post by wlesieutre »

zamalek wrote: post #154
vanderZwan wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know all of this thanks to an old lecture I once attended (not a phone dev), so my information might be a bit off and outdated, but in broad strokes: it's partially due to naive programming practices, but phone manufacturers are also somewhat to blame. 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 gras…

There's a very informative XMPP XEP[1] with mobile considerations that touches on what you said (although that analogy of yours is great!). Where my problem lies is: even if I was the cleaner at Whatsapp or FB I'd be making noise about battery life, I'd do everything I could. Put another way: I struggle to understand how a company that is about mobile doesn't put being a good mobile citizen first and foremost. It's n…

> Put another way: I struggle to understand how a company that is about mobile doesn't put being a good mobile citizen first and foremost.

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.

Post reply on HN