Re:Facebook going down meant more than just a social network...
by toast0 on Monday October 04, 2021 @11:25PM
(#28755174)
I worked at WhatsApp until 2019 and worked on technical stuff for the WhatsApp part of the zero-rating deals. Part A is definitely part of that, but AFAIK, your part B, network prioritization was never part of the deal.
Facebook does a lot of network peering though, and has PoPs in Brazil, so there's some potential that Signal goes over transit and WhatsApp goes over peering, but peering is not (or was not, when I was there) a requirement for zero rating. I think AWS may peer in Brazil as well?
WhatsApp likely works better than Signal on congested networks because of the protocol design, timeout length, and DNS fallbacks. These are things Signal could improve on. If your network is so congested that packets are delayed 30-60 seconds and DNS always times out, I expect WhatsApp to still work, but not a whole lot else. That's solvable for other services, but it takes time and determination and accepting the use case as valid and important. Of course, all that and WhatsApp was still inaccessible for a significant amount of time today.
Facebook does a lot of network peering though, and has PoPs in Brazil, so there's some potential that Signal goes over transit and WhatsApp goes over peering, but peering is not (or was not, when I was there) a requirement for zero rating. I think AWS may peer in Brazil as well?
WhatsApp likely works better than Signal on congested networks because of the protocol design, timeout length, and DNS fallbacks. These are things Signal could improve on. If your network is so congested that packets are delayed 30-60 seconds and DNS always times out, I expect WhatsApp to still work, but not a whole lot else. That's solvable for other services, but it takes time and determination and accepting the use case as valid and important. Of course, all that and WhatsApp was still inaccessible for a significant amount of time today.