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Most of the Web Really Sucks If You Have a Slow Connection (danluu.com)
Dan Luu, hardware/software engineer at Microsoft, writes in a blog post: While it's easy to blame page authors because there's a lot of low-hanging fruit on the page side, there's just as much low-hanging fruit on the browser side. Why does my browser open up 6 TCP connections to try to download six images at once when I'm on a slow satellite connection? That just guarantees that all six images will time out! I can sometimes get some images to load by refreshing the page a few times (and waiting ten minutes each time), but why shouldn't the browser handle retries for me? If you think about it for a few minutes, there are a lot of optimizations that browsers could do for people on slow connections, but because they don't, the best current solution for users appears to be: use w3m when you can, and then switch to a browser with ad-blocking when that doesn't work. But why should users have to use two entirely different programs, one of which has a text-based interface only computer nerds will find palatable?
Why does my browser open up 6 TCP connections to try to download six images at once when I'm on a slow satellite connection?
i used to have this problem until i switched to Lynx. Now pesky things like popups and adware are a thing of the past! six streams indeed.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Why does my browser open up 6 TCP connections to try to download six images at once when I'm on a slow satellite connection? That just guarantees that all six images will time out!
The problem is not opening 6 connections, or failure to retry, but a timeout that's too short.
A lot of what drives modern internet design is e-commerce. If you're on a slow connection, you probably don't have much money to spend, so why should anyone care? Or so the thinking goes....
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
Even with fast Internet connections, websites are so bloated with ancillary scripts and tracking code and cross linking to 20 different various advertising and content servers that you get stuck waiting no matter what. CDNs helped but you're still hostage to X advertising companies one slow server because it's not on that CDN.
I remember WordPerfect 6. All we, as users and support techs, asked, was that they did not make it slow with new features and debris.
They failed. Why?
We find out in one of the responses from the dev team, via support: "All our developers use it too, and they have no problems with performance. Perhaps you need top upgrade your computer?"
Well, we find out also that the dev team had 486DX2--66 machines with 16MB RAM. In an age when most attorneys' assistants were using 386 machines with 4MB RAM, maybe, and Windows 3.0/3.1. Yep, hanging on. A busy assistant would reboot twice a day. Had the WP dev team been testing even minimally on mainstream workstations, they would have known, and had a better answer, like "that's the price for state-of-the-art features, so suck it up and upgrade"
How is this related to smartphone apps and network performance?
First, the issue has nothing to do with user satisfaction. It is about 0. app infrastructure and 1. marketing.
These apps that require a server infrastructure aren't going to be built to serve 'slow' users. Open connections spanning minutes are expensive. Adapting to network speed by stretching timeouts and optimizing data flow don't make any money for advertisers or the app itself, the devs are focused on new features, gadgets, and monetizing the product. The rural market is literally worthless to them.
And since the apps are marketed to majorities, smaller populations out in the slow network space have no voice. And no money.
Lightweight apps like Twitter (how much data DOES it take to send a 140 character message?) and SMS manage, but even maps fail spectacularly when they are used in 2G network spaces, and there are still a lot of those.
My complaint is that in a metro area, during lunch, the congestion is so bad I lose data entirely. LTE4G is available, as well as UMTS, but when I lose I don't even get 2G - they just drop connections. Reboot my phone and get service for a few minutes, and then gone again. It's just 5500+ employees going out for lunch in a square mile. I have asked, and no carrier is immune to this. And building out capacity there isn't going to happen, because the congestion occurs for 3 hours a day, Monday-Friday. Nope, not worth it. When voice stats failing, maybe.
Surprisingly, the PSTN had minimum service levels dictated by state legislation, and while the penalties were often minimal, there is NOTHING like this in cell service that I am aware of. AMPS and NAMPS didn't really have them, and CDMA/GSM apparently did not. Now that cell service is the only service for many, SLAs for service woudl be useful. I doubt they will be proposed, enacted, or enforced.
And app performance will *never* be enforceable. Too many variables. I hear ya, rural performance is terrible, and every claim that it will be improved hinges on the cost benefit analysis. That will not change for a while, even with Band 12/700MHz/600MHz spectrum being deployed. Nope.
Now Gigabit LTE and the next gen give us hope that the cell companies will build out and try to displace the incumbent wired ISPs, but I'm dreaming here. Or am I? Since rural American doesn't have wired ISPs, it may be overlooked during the transition to 'copious bandwidth'. Glad I don't live in the woods any more, though if I didn't have a great job I would move there and disconnect.