The Internet connection in Bokondini is a 1 Mbps satellite connection with a 10:1 contention ratio, which means that actual speeds can get as low as 100 Kbps. We haven’t been to Bok since we turned on the network, but when we were there, we had pretty much unlimited access for the three of us, with a request to use it lightly during school-hours. Even though the connection was a wee bit slower than our 100 Mbps line back home, I grew to really, really appreciate it, and am half inclined to think it’s the perfect amount of Internet. When I talk about our work in Bokondini I often get the question of “what can you do with 1 Mbps today anyways?” so I figured I’d write a post explicitly talking about some of our network experiences.
Older Protocols Work Better
First and foremost, older Internet protocols were inherently designed for slower speeds and less-reliable network conditions – so it’s no surprise they tend to work better. Somewhat interestingly, this split maps almost exactly to whether the protocol is designed to be run in the browser, or exists as a standalone application. Load up OSX’s “Mail” app that uses SMTP? No problem at all. Try to load Gmail in my browser? Not a chance!
On this note, a surprising culprit here was Slack. I naively assumed that the Slack app on my computer used XMPP, or any one of those classic standardized chat applications – but I was dead wrong. Turns out, Slack is Web-based, not that resilient, and surprisingly network-intensive for just a chat application. After realizing that I was literally unable to connect to Slack, I switched over all my correspondence to email, which went much, much smoother.
Web Interactivity Is Non-Existent
Our position behind a satellite link means that every round-trip takes a LOT longer than normal. This is a major killer for the new trend in modern (web 2.0? 3.0?) web-applications to (1) quickly load a shell of a page and (2) dynamically request the rest of the page as you interact with it. The biggest offenders of this practice that I noticed are articles that only load the next paragraph when you scroll down, rather than just fetching the whole page (all 20 kb of text, really?) and letting your browser handle the rendering.
Text-Only Webpages Are Awesome!
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we discovered certain news organizations provide stripped-down and text-only versions of their sites! If you’re curious, check out https://text.npr.org and https://lite.cnn.com for some great examples. It made me immensely happy to see content providers showing awareness of constrained-bandwidth scenarios, and is also worth mentioning that (to my understanding) these types of websites are much more friendly and compatible with accessibility tools (such as text-to-speech readers). We had to kinda “guess around” and use google to find some of these sites, but I’d love to see this practice become more widespread and/or standardized. It brings to mind how mobile website encoding started with the “m.” subdomain (still used by Wikipedia and pretty much no one else?) and then evolving into the responsive designs in use today… it would be fascinating to see backhaul-constrained access go the same way, maybe loading bare-bones content first and keying the responsivity off of network performance metrics.
CDNs Matter A Lot
Almost all satellite networks today are “bent-pipes,” meaning that the satellite doesn’t do any routing/switching and simply re-transmits our signal down to a predetermined ground station. In our case, that station was located in Australia, which means that websites with a CDN presence in Australia performed much, much better than US-based websites. Special shout-out to YouTube: I seriously didn’t expect video-streaming to work at all, but our YouTube tests came out remarkably usable, with relatively minimal buffering.
Interruptions are Interrupted
My favorite thing, by far, about working in Bokondini was that it felt like the Internet gave me everything I needed, but nothing I didn’t. The majority of my online work-tools (i.e. email and git) worked okay, if a little bit slower than usual, and my local work tools (text and code editors) were obviously fine. Even Google Docs worked great – I’d set it to offline mode, type my heart out, and then just get online to sync the document every so often.
Most general-use Web pages loaded fast enough to not be obnoxious, but slow enough to require my intent and sustained interest (relevant XKCD). Say I was writing an article and needed to lookup a statistic? Go to Google, search for it, wait a little bit, open the website, wait a little bit, not a problem at all. Unconsciously open a tab and surf over to Facebook to kill time? It loaded slowly enough to allow me some time to question/reflect on what I’m doing (really just wasting time), and I’d often end up closing the tab before it loaded. Turns out, the Internet’s a whole lot less of a distraction-machine when you make the instant gratification even slightly less instant!
1 Mbps For All?
Overall, I was remarkably impressed by how useful 1 Mbps Internet was, even in the moden Web ecosystem. Lately, I’ve been considering conducting another 1 Mbps experiment here in Seattle, to see if my user behavior comes out the same, or if the experience is changed by being geographically closer to common websites (or just being located in a highly connected city). Especially if it ends up helping me ignore my typical time-wasting sites, maybe it’ll turn out that more is less, less is more, and I end up preferring 1 Mbps to my 100!
Taking this idea even further, my colleague and friend Steve Song wrote a great post a while ago about the hypothetical economics of just providing free 2G cellular services (voice and SMS) to everyone. It’s pretty hard to top the social utility provided by voice and text services, but as more and more voice traffic turns into VoIP, I’ve started thinking and wondering about the Internet equivalent. Maybe ”1 Mbps for all” is really what we want to shoot for…
