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Facebook '2G Tuesdays' to better understand markets like India
- pnevares 11y agoAn option if you'd like to try this yourself, at home: https://shuhaowu.com/blog/network_emulation_on_your_router.html https://shuhaowu.com/blog/network_emulation_on_your_router.h... (Previously on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10224547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10224547 )
- JorgeGT 11y agoThey should also try using older/slower phones that are representative of those areas. I remember that I had an LG L7 which was barely usable at all even freshly reset.
- gh0sts 11y agoI believe the FB Empathy Lab[0] is all about this sort of device testing [0]: https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/656582605173858305 https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/656582605173858305
- storyinmemo 11y agoAny employee can grab a crappy phone. Some of the Messenger crowd have 20+ phones on their desks. 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.
- vlucas 11y agoIn unrelated news, Facebook employees have begun to organize "Work from home Tuesdays".
- oblio 11y agoThey're smart about it: > 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.
- antjanus 11y agoand then they use that info when evaluating an employee's eagerness to move forward, be a team player etc. !
- eitally 11y agoI'd be shocked if I learned they didn't steal this idea from Google. <edit> Not sure why downvoted. Google has had hobbled networks like this for a long time, for exactly the same reason.
- gh0sts 11y agoI don't think it's a bad thing for Facebook to take this obviously good idea from Google and adopt it themselves. It seems that the only outcome is a better experience for users.
- untog 11y agoProbably being downvoted for using the word "steal". It has a negative connotation where there should not be one.
- eitally 11y agoI didn't mean it negatively. It's a brilliant idea and worth copying.
- _delirium 11y agoThis 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...
- kuschku 11y agoEspecially sites that hide content until all CSS and fonts are loaded... SO ANNOYING.
- olavgg 11y ago1+ from me! Its so friggin frustrating. I remember back in the days I had a 14.4k modem for reading news articles. I could read the article almost immediately, even if it took minutes to load some of the images.
- mmatants 11y agoThis is why I am perfectly happy with our team's local Vagrant development boxes being quite sluggish - the visible lag has surfaced a few timing and UX bugs already. It's important to feel the customer pain as your own.
- johansch 11y agoWonderful! - but it seems a tad late. :) Even the poorest parts of India should be about to move to 3G (or even 4G) within the next few years due to the more efficient usage of spectrum. Of course it would be insanely overloaded with lots of delayed packets...
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoSo, what I'm hearing from you is it is not too late.
- johansch 11y agoIt's really, really late (8-10 years) but not too late?
- Altaer 11y agoI believe this will have a positive effect in the U.S. as well. For whatever reason, I get 1 bar of service at the office if I'm lucky. The Facebook app is frustrating to use under those circumstances. On the contrary, Twitter is actually not that bad. I've been impressed with it under bad network situations. Consequently, I find myself opening up Twitter a lot more than Facebook during breaks.
- delinka 11y agoEvery software shop in the world should be designing and coding for low connectivity speeds.
- johansch 11y agoI/they (I am no longer with Opera Software) did that for a decade with Opera Mini. It's an interesting engineering challenge. 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...
- elros 11y agoWhy? 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...
- mynameisvlad 11y agoProbably because you don't know where your app will blow up. Unless the app is geographically restricted, there's no real telling where the spark will happen. Maybe it unintentionally solves a massive problem that is happening right now in India, and you suddenly have a massive influx of 2G users. If you hadn't even considered the experience for them, it won't matter how quickly it blows up; it'll fizzle immediately when you have a shitty experience. 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.
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoHappy visitors to your page/app/whatever? 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.
- kogepathic 11y agoCue 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.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoBe 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. :(.
- dksidana 11y agoWe, at hike ( http://www.hike.in http://www.hike.in), did following things: 1. gave the cheap android smartphone to use as their primary phone 2. asked employees to stay on 2G on their mobile phones It helped a us lot to improve our product for India market.
- justboxing 11y agoYour app looks interesting, how come no "About" or "Team" page??
- funkyy 11y agoFrom when "Team" page is a standard?
- grk 11y agoYour landing page takes 15 seconds to load on a simulated "Regular 3G" connection in Chrome. If you'd like I could walk you through fixing some of the most obvious problems, my contact info is in my profile.
- taytus 11y agoI need help understanding why this is being down voted.
- lamby 11y agoAs you asked.. firstly because doesn't speak to the actual idea being put forward, merely implying that they are—at best—incompetent and at worst hypocritical. It then compounds this faux pas with a tender for work which seems a little galling.
- acdha 11y agoA cursory look shows that this is not an implication but a statement of fact: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151027_FV_1ATV/1/details/ 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?
- eliben 11y agoIs Facebook still planning to gate the internet in India behind Facebook, though? I recall they had plans to give folks in third world countries access to Facebook only, which is extremely sad.
- sliverstorm 11y agoExcept they were going to offer that service for free, which IMO changes the picture.
- rebolek 11y agoExcept people don't like it at all http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/26/technology/facebook-meets-skepticism-in-bid-to-expand-internet-in-india.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/26/technology/facebook-meets-...
- sliverstorm 11y agoWell 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.
- pyvpx 11y agohow do you compete with free?
- wnevets 11y agohow does HBO compete with free tv? They make a great product.
- kamaal 11y ago>>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 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.
- davbeer 11y agoI like how one of the employees in the foto is wearing a react t-shirt :)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Animats 11y agoAd blocking will improve response times on slow links by about 50%. More for really bad sites.
- kale 11y agoHow 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 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.
- sp332 11y agoFirefox for Android supports many addons, including uBlock Origin, Ghostery, HTTPS Everywhere, NoScript, etc. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/
- 885895 11y agoAfter having had the first few addons I tried to install a good while back tell me Firefox for Android was not supported, I gave up on trying. I love uBlock Origin on the desktop and thanks to you now I have it on my tablet too!
- kale 11y agoThanks for this! Firefox runs great on my phone, and this is an older phone that is also throttled for battery life.
- chimeracoder 11y ago> 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
- plonh 11y agoIs everyone at FB so young that they don't remember 2G in America?
- dublinben 11y agoDepending on the source, the average age of their employees is between 25-28 years old. That's young enough to realistically expect that they've never owned a smartphone without 3G.
- mikeash 11y agoI don't think age matters that much. Smartphones didn't really take off until 3G was pretty common. I'd wager the vast majority of smartphone users of any age in the US got a 3G-capable phone as their first smartphone. Speaking personally, I'm 35 and my first smartphone was an iPhone 3GS.
- babuskov 11y agoEven 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.
- gotchange 11y agoI think that Chrome has a network throttling simulator in their Dev Tools that could help and give interested people a rough idea of what to expect from the page performance under severe network conditions.
- minimaxir 11y agoIt'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/iterate/device-mode/?hl=en https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/iter...
- ejdyksen 11y agoAlso, Mac OS and iOS have the Network Link Conditioner, which can do the same thing (from a network perspective) at the system level: http://nshipster.com/network-link-conditioner/ http://nshipster.com/network-link-conditioner/
- connor4312 11y agoAnd Windows, of course, has Fiddler: http://www.telerik.com/download/fiddler http://www.telerik.com/download/fiddler
- nantes 11y agoAnd for completeness, Linux has tc [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tc_(Linux) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tc_(Linux)
- witty_username 11y agoPractically speaking, wondershaper is way simpler for basic throttling.
- Splines 11y agoNEWT may be more appropriate if you are interested in not-HTTP: http://blogs.technet.com/b/juanand/archive/2010/03/05/standalone-network-emulator-tool.aspx http://blogs.technet.com/b/juanand/archive/2010/03/05/standa...
- mslot 11y ago
- zobzu 11y agoI use edge for email, no web browsing or apps. waaay too slow these days, too much data to transfer even with images off (it used to work ok when 2G was a first world thing)
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoEDGE is semi-usable with Opera Mini.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoDo 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.)
- amyjess 11y agoI'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).
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoEvery 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.
- timmaah 11y agoVerizon and AT&T have vastly better coverage.
- mason55 11y agoAnd this is the exact reason I left T-Mobile. AT&T have 4G coverage on pretty much the entire interstate system. When I had T-Mobile I'd drive from NYC to Columbus, OH and have no signal for the 8+ hours between the two cities.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- robk 11y agoI'm surprised Facebook UK engineering isn't driving this. Reception is terrible country wide here
- rconti 11y agoHa, I'm glad I'm not the only one. Just posted a reply to another comment here about my visit to the UK last fall.
- cyzhu 11y agoGood idea！ My college days are spent in the 2G network， it's the segment unforgettable！
- snarkyturtle 11y agoOf course, react minified is something like 137mb... and that's not including any other libraries like flux.
- snarkyturtle 11y agoOf course, react minified is something like 137mb... and that's not including any other libraries like flux.
- Sevzinn 11y agoWhat is Facebook? Looks like some website a ten year old boy coded.
- eggie 11y agoI see you are downvoted, but I had a laugh. It looks familiar. (https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/01/f9/75/01f975659e2ec1560876d9ca030e8738.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/01/f9/75/01f975659...)
- Oatseller 11y agoLink to the Facebook Engineering blog post https://code.facebook.com/posts/1556407321275493/building-for-emerging-markets-the-story-behind-2g-tuesdays/ https://code.facebook.com/posts/1556407321275493/building-fo...
- Spooky23 11y agoThey should add "no battery recharge Wednesday".
- themodelplumber 11y agoAnd "activate every push notification available on my device Thursday".
- rgarrett88 11y agoNumber one reason I use the mobile site. Or mobile sites in general.
- dguido 11y agoCan they do "Underground Thursdays"? Nearly every app degrades to unusable the second I get on the subway.
- somberi 11y agoI had recently started building a payment network business in India and the bandwidth situation is constantly at the top of our minds. 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 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.
- shubhamjain 11y agoThere is also a problem of cellular companies with fake "unlimited" plans. Basically, they offer 3G speeds only till a certain limit after which they throttle it down so much that it is barely usable, like Idea Cellular[1]. 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=3Gnetpre http://www.ideacellular.com/idea/select-circle?PlanType=3Gne...
- nhf 11y agoTo be fair that's a pretty common tactic even here in the US. T-Mobile's cheaper "unlimited data" plans are 5GB of 3G/4G with aggressive traffic shaping afterwards that basically dings you down to 2G-ish speeds unless you're browsing at 3AM or something. Do these companies just not disclose that though?
- sreejithr 11y agoEvery company should have such a day in my opinion. It makes you think hard about every KB you're cramming in your requests.
- aksx 11y agoWhat facebook needs to realize is that 2G is not the only factor because of which people don't use the facebook app. 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.
- zamalek 11y ago> 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?
- vanderZwan 11y agoI 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 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.
- 746F7475 11y agoEven with faster speed available I used 2G for a year because I got it basically for free. Only recently with change to my job I upgraded to 3G to get better audio streaming while on move. Spotify worked fine when I was stationary, but couldn't keep up with me on the highway.
- dbg31415 11y agoAlso known as: * 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!
- collyw 11y agoI never bothered on having a machine upgarde at work when offered for a similar reason. If stuff is running slow, then it will be noticable on my mahcine rather than on the more powerful production server. That and reinstalling everthing is a pain.