Engineering for Slow Internet

Re:Engineering for Slow Internet by kylehotchkiss on Friday May 31, 2024 @02:55AM (#40532185)

WhatsApp has a massive audience in developing countries where it's normal for people to have slower internet and much slower devices. That perspective being so embedded in their development goals certainly has given WhatsApp good reason to be the leading messaging platform in many countries around the world

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Re:Engineering for Slow Internet by nicbou on Friday May 31, 2024 @04:13AM (#40532562)

It works remarkably well when your phone runs out of data and you get capped at 8 kbps. Even voice calls work smoothly.

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Re:Engineering for Slow Internet by qingcharles on Friday May 31, 2024 @01:44PM (#40538114)

LOL 8kbps. Damn. That takes me back. I built the first version of one of the world's largest music streaming sites on a 9.6kbps connection.

I was working from home (we had no offices yet) and my cable Internet got cut off. My only back up was a serial cable to a 2G Nokia 9000i. I had to re-encode a chunk of the music catalog at 8kbps so I could test it from home before I pushed the code to production.

Psychoacoustic compression is a miracle.

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Re:Engineering for Slow Internet by greenish_shores on Friday May 31, 2024 @03:30PM (#40539306)

Nokia 9000i, so you had to work on CSD (which is usually billed per-minute, like dial-up), not even GPRS. How much did that cost you? :P

BTW, an interesting thing is that some/most carriers allow you to use CSD/HSCSD over 3G these days, and you can establish data CSD connection between two phone numbers, yielding essentially a dedicated L2 pipe which isn't routed over internet. Can have much lower latency and jitter if that's what you need. Some specialized telemetry is still using that, however as 3G is slowly getting phased out, it will probably have to change.

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Re:Engineering for Slow Internet by qingcharles on Friday May 31, 2024 @03:55PM (#40539528)

God, the cost was probably horrid, but I was connecting in, setting tasks running and logging out. This was late 1999 in the UK, so per-minute prices were high. Also, these were Windows servers, so I had to sluggishly RDP into them, no nice low-bandwidth terminals.

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Re:Engineering for Slow Internet by Scoundreller on Friday May 31, 2024 @09:35AM (#40534947)

Even wealthy countries will have dead zones (Toronto subway until recently, and like 90% of the landmass), and at least in Canada, “running out of data” and just having none left (or it being extremely expensive) was relatively common until about the last year or two when things got competitive (finally!).

Still have an entire territory where everything is satellite fed (Nunavut), including its capital.

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Re:Engineering for Slow Internet by greenish_shores on Friday May 31, 2024 @03:29PM (#40539297)

Wow. I didn't knew that Nunavut is entirely satellite fed. That's very interesting to know, thanks. Do you have some more info, though? What kind of satellite - geostationary, LEO? Also which constellation has the most share of traffic from Nunavut?

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Re:Engineering for Slow Internet by Scoundreller on Friday May 31, 2024 @09:35PM (#40542115)

Unsure if other telcos have their own setups, but:

> Northwestel, one of biggest internet service providers in the North, said it provides broadband service for all Nunavut communities using Telesat's Telestar 19 VANTAGE high-throughput satellite. After the satellite was deployed in July 2018, Northwestel said it would significantly improve broadband connectivity in the territory, increasing speeds to 15 megabits per second.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/efforts-underway-to-improve-...

Interestingly, the same satellite (but different transponders) probably supplies internet to a good chunk of transatlantic voyages between US/Can and Europe: https://www.telesat.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Telstar-1...

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