5 ms·

There exist a few billion people without LTE. Meta doesn’t only operate in the western world.

noprocrasted 2y ago
Are there really many situations where a 10kbps connection would actually be stable enough to be usable? Usually when you get these kinds of speeds it means the underlying connection is well and truly compromised, and any kind of real-time audio would fail anyway because you're drowning in a sea of packet loss and retransmissions. Even in cases where you do get a stable 10kbps connection from upstream, how are you going to manage getting any usable traffic through it when everything nowadays wastes bandwidth and competes with you (just look at any iOS device's background network activity - and that's before running any apps which usually embed dozens of malicious SDKs all competing for bandwidth)?
- bogwog 2y ago
  I don't know what you consider "stable enough", but the 30% packet loss demo in the article is pretty impressive.
- zeroxfe 2y ago
  > Are there really many situations where a 10kbps connection would actually be stable enough to be usable? Yes there are. We ran on stable low bandwidth connections for a very long time before we had stable high bandwidth connections. A large part of the underdeveloped world has very low bandwidth, and use 5 - 10 Kbps voice channels.
  - noprocrasted 2y ago
    > We ran on stable low bandwidth connections Are you talking about the general "we" or your situation in particular? For the former, yes sure we started with dial-up, then DSL, etc, but back then software was built with these limitations in mind. Constant background traffic for "product improvement" purposes would be completely unthinkable 20 years ago; now it's the norm. All this crap (and associated TLS handshakes) quickly adds up if all you've got is kilobits per second.
    - dspillett 2y ago
      > Are you talking about the general "we" I assume the general-ish “we”, where it is general to the likes of you and I (and that zeroxfe). There are likely many in the world stuck at the end of connections run over tech that this “general subset” would consider archaic, and that zeroxfe was implying their connections, while slow, may be similarly stable to ours back then. Also, a low bandwidth stable connection could be one of many multiplexed through a higher bandwidth stable connection.
    - zeroxfe 2y ago
      Let's not move the goalposts here :-) The context is an audio codec, not heavyweight web applications, in response to your question "Are there really many situations where a 10kbps connection would actually be stable enough to be usable?" And I'm saying yes, in that context, there are many situations, like VoIP, where 10kbps is usable. Nobody here would argue that 10kbps is usable today for the "typical" browser-based Internet use.
- meindnoch 2y ago
  >Are there really many situations where a 10kbps connection would actually be stable enough to be usable? Scroll to this part of the article: >Here are two audio samples at 14 kbps with heavy 30 percent receiver-side packet loss.
- gorkish 2y ago
  Yes; backhaul connections in telephony applications are often very stable and are already capacity managed by tuning codec bandwidth. Say you are carrying 1000 calls with uLaw (64kbps * 1000) over a pair of links and one fails. Do you A) carry 500 calls on the remaining link B) stuff all calls onto the same link and drop 50% of the packets or C) Change to a 32kbps codec? It seems you may be imaging the failure case where your "ISP is slow" or something like that due to congestion or packet loss -- as I posted elsewhere in the thread the bandwidth is only one aspect of how a "low bitrate" codec may be expected to perform in a real world application. How such a codec degrades when faced with bit errors or even further reduced channel capacity is often more important in the real application. These issues are normally solved with things like FEC which can be incorporated as part of the codec design itself or incorporated as part of the modem/encoding/modulation of the underlying transport.
  - wmf 2y ago
    Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp don't run over TDM though. If WhatsApp is only getting ~10 kbps, that's due to extreme congestion.
    - gorkish 2y ago
      Yes; but what is your point? A congested network like you describe isnt ever going to reliably carry realtime communications anyway due to latency and jitter. All you could reasonably due to 'punch through' that situation is to use dirty tricks to give your client more than its fair share of network resources. 6kbps is 10x less data to transfer than 64kbps, so for all the async aspects of Messenger or WhatsApp there is still enormous benefit to smaller data.
- dspillett 2y ago
  > Are there really many situations where a 10kbps connection would actually be stable enough to be usable? Yes (most likely: that was an intuited “yes” not one born of actually checking facts!). There are many places still running things over POTS rather than anything like (A)DSL, line quality issues could push that down low and even if you have a stable 28kbit/s you might want to do something with it at the same time as the audio comms. Also, you may be trying to cram multiple channels over a relatively slow (but stable) link. Given the quality of the audio when calling some support lines I suspect this is very common. Furthermore, you might find a much faster unstable connection with a packet-loss “correcting” transport layered on top effectively producing a stable connection of much lesser speed (though you might get periods of <10kbit here due to prolonged dropouts and/or have to institute an artificial delay if the resend latency is high).
- kragen 2y ago
  i live in a third-world country, and simplifying a bit, my cellphone plan gives me 55 megabytes a day. i get charged if i go over. that's 2 hours of 64kbps talk time on jitsi but would be 12 hours at 10kbps
treflop 2y ago
Even in the Western world, you can appreciate low bandwidth apps even you are a music festival or traveling through relative wilderness.
- BenjiWiebe 2y ago
  Or living in relative wilderness. Or living in a dead zone between moderately populated areas (raises hand).

Are there really many situations where a 10kbps connection would actually be stable enough to be usable? Usually when you get these kinds of speeds it means the underlying connection is well and truly compromised, and any kind of real-time audio would fail anyway because you're drowning in a sea of packet loss and retransmissions. Even in cases where you do get a stable 10kbps connection from upstream, how are you going to manage getting any usable traffic through it when everything nowadays wastes bandwidth and competes with you (just look at any iOS device's background network activity - and that's before running any apps which usually embed dozens of malicious SDKs all competing for bandwidth)?

bogwog 2y ago
I don't know what you consider "stable enough", but the 30% packet loss demo in the article is pretty impressive.
zeroxfe 2y ago
> Are there really many situations where a 10kbps connection would actually be stable enough to be usable? Yes there are. We ran on stable low bandwidth connections for a very long time before we had stable high bandwidth connections. A large part of the underdeveloped world has very low bandwidth, and use 5 - 10 Kbps voice channels.
- noprocrasted 2y ago
  > We ran on stable low bandwidth connections Are you talking about the general "we" or your situation in particular? For the former, yes sure we started with dial-up, then DSL, etc, but back then software was built with these limitations in mind. Constant background traffic for "product improvement" purposes would be completely unthinkable 20 years ago; now it's the norm. All this crap (and associated TLS handshakes) quickly adds up if all you've got is kilobits per second.
  - dspillett 2y ago
    > Are you talking about the general "we" I assume the general-ish “we”, where it is general to the likes of you and I (and that zeroxfe). There are likely many in the world stuck at the end of connections run over tech that this “general subset” would consider archaic, and that zeroxfe was implying their connections, while slow, may be similarly stable to ours back then. Also, a low bandwidth stable connection could be one of many multiplexed through a higher bandwidth stable connection.
  - zeroxfe 2y ago
    Let's not move the goalposts here :-) The context is an audio codec, not heavyweight web applications, in response to your question "Are there really many situations where a 10kbps connection would actually be stable enough to be usable?" And I'm saying yes, in that context, there are many situations, like VoIP, where 10kbps is usable. Nobody here would argue that 10kbps is usable today for the "typical" browser-based Internet use.
meindnoch 2y ago
>Are there really many situations where a 10kbps connection would actually be stable enough to be usable? Scroll to this part of the article: >Here are two audio samples at 14 kbps with heavy 30 percent receiver-side packet loss.
gorkish 2y ago
Yes; backhaul connections in telephony applications are often very stable and are already capacity managed by tuning codec bandwidth. Say you are carrying 1000 calls with uLaw (64kbps * 1000) over a pair of links and one fails. Do you A) carry 500 calls on the remaining link B) stuff all calls onto the same link and drop 50% of the packets or C) Change to a 32kbps codec? It seems you may be imaging the failure case where your "ISP is slow" or something like that due to congestion or packet loss -- as I posted elsewhere in the thread the bandwidth is only one aspect of how a "low bitrate" codec may be expected to perform in a real world application. How such a codec degrades when faced with bit errors or even further reduced channel capacity is often more important in the real application. These issues are normally solved with things like FEC which can be incorporated as part of the codec design itself or incorporated as part of the modem/encoding/modulation of the underlying transport.
- wmf 2y ago
  Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp don't run over TDM though. If WhatsApp is only getting ~10 kbps, that's due to extreme congestion.
  - gorkish 2y ago
    Yes; but what is your point? A congested network like you describe isnt ever going to reliably carry realtime communications anyway due to latency and jitter. All you could reasonably due to 'punch through' that situation is to use dirty tricks to give your client more than its fair share of network resources. 6kbps is 10x less data to transfer than 64kbps, so for all the async aspects of Messenger or WhatsApp there is still enormous benefit to smaller data.
dspillett 2y ago
> Are there really many situations where a 10kbps connection would actually be stable enough to be usable? Yes (most likely: that was an intuited “yes” not one born of actually checking facts!). There are many places still running things over POTS rather than anything like (A)DSL, line quality issues could push that down low and even if you have a stable 28kbit/s you might want to do something with it at the same time as the audio comms. Also, you may be trying to cram multiple channels over a relatively slow (but stable) link. Given the quality of the audio when calling some support lines I suspect this is very common. Furthermore, you might find a much faster unstable connection with a packet-loss “correcting” transport layered on top effectively producing a stable connection of much lesser speed (though you might get periods of <10kbit here due to prolonged dropouts and/or have to institute an artificial delay if the resend latency is high).
kragen 2y ago
i live in a third-world country, and simplifying a bit, my cellphone plan gives me 55 megabytes a day. i get charged if i go over. that's 2 hours of 64kbps talk time on jitsi but would be 12 hours at 10kbps

treflop 2y ago

Even in the Western world, you can appreciate low bandwidth apps even you are a music festival or traveling through relative wilderness.

BenjiWiebe 2y ago
Or living in relative wilderness. Or living in a dead zone between moderately populated areas (raises hand).