
Facebook '2G Tuesdays' to better understand markets like India - Oatseller
http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-2g-tuesdays-to-slow-employee-internet-speeds-down-2015-10?op=1
======
minimaxir
It's worth noting that Chrome has a Device Emulation feature, which allows you
to throttle connection speed to common presets such as EDGE/2G/3G/etc. It
makes testing mobile layouts easier, at the least.

[https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-
devtools/iter...](https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-
devtools/iterate/device-mode/?hl=en)

~~~
ejdyksen
Also, Mac OS and iOS have the Network Link Conditioner, which can do the same
thing (from a network perspective) at the system level:

[http://nshipster.com/network-link-conditioner/](http://nshipster.com/network-
link-conditioner/)

~~~
connor4312
And Windows, of course, has Fiddler:

[http://www.telerik.com/download/fiddler](http://www.telerik.com/download/fiddler)

~~~
nantes
And for completeness, Linux has tc [1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tc_(Linux)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tc_\(Linux\))

~~~
witty_username
Practically speaking, wondershaper is way simpler for basic throttling.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Do Facebookers never venture outside of cities? Because maybe the UK is weird,
but getting 2G even in developed areas isn't that uncommon for me. Sure
there's 4G in cities and 3G in many places, but there's plenty of places with
poor signal or outdated transmitters (like the town I live in).

(This is especially noticeable if you're in a train or a bus where you're
frequently changing cells.)

~~~
amyjess
I'm American, and I took a road trip last month from Dallas to NYC and back
(going through Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and tiny bits of a
few other states).

Unless I was in a city, I only had 2G signal, and in a few places I didn't
even have that (but those were rare).

Edit: for reference, my carrier at the time was Simple Mobile, an MVNO of
T-Mobile (I'm no longer with them anymore: I just activated Project Fi today).

~~~
mason55
And this is the exact reason I left T-Mobile. AT&T have 4G coverage on pretty
much the entire interstate system. When I had T-Mobile I'd drive from NYC to
Columbus, OH and have no signal for the 8+ hours between the two cities.

~~~
rizwank
With Band 12 LTE, this is changing rapidly on TMO.

~~~
colechristensen
Upgrading to a Nexus 6 made vast improvements to my T-Mobile coverage as it
supported the new bands.

------
Spooky23
They should add "no battery recharge Wednesday".

~~~
themodelplumber
And "activate every push notification available on my device Thursday".

~~~
mikeash
"Friends keep posting idiotic political rants Friday."

~~~
aksx
and let's not forget "Candy Crush Invitations Saturdays"

------
_delirium
This would help me too, as a first-worlder: I often use T-mobile's free global
data roaming, which is super-nice to have, but capped to 2G speeds (128kbps).
It becomes quite clear that some sites' designers have never tested their
functionality at 128kbps...

~~~
kuschku
Especially sites that hide content until all CSS and fonts are loaded... SO
ANNOYING.

~~~
olavgg
1+ from me! Its so friggin frustrating. I remember back in the days I had a
14.4k modem for reading news articles. I could read the article almost
immediately, even if it took minutes to load some of the images.

------
dksidana
We, at hike ( [http://www.hike.in](http://www.hike.in)), did following things:
1\. gave the cheap android smartphone to use as their primary phone 2\. asked
employees to stay on 2G on their mobile phones

It helped a us lot to improve our product for India market.

~~~
grk
Your landing page takes 15 seconds to load on a simulated "Regular 3G"
connection in Chrome. If you'd like I could walk you through fixing some of
the most obvious problems, my contact info is in my profile.

~~~
taytus
I need help understanding why this is being down voted.

~~~
lamby
As you asked.. firstly because doesn't speak to the _actual_ idea being put
forward, merely implying that they are—at best—incompetent and at worst
hypocritical. It then compounds this faux pas with a tender for work which
seems a little galling.

~~~
mst
"I could walk you through" seems to me to be an offer to help, not a pitch for
business.

It struck me as basically somebody saying "if you care about it for your app,
I'd be happy to help you care about it for your website".

I feel like you're assuming bad faith, and the person confused as to why the
comment was being downvoted was applying the principle of charity instead.

------
Altaer
I believe this will have a positive effect in the U.S. as well. For whatever
reason, I get 1 bar of service at the office if I'm lucky. The Facebook app is
frustrating to use under those circumstances. On the contrary, Twitter is
actually not that bad. I've been impressed with it under bad network
situations. Consequently, I find myself opening up Twitter a lot more than
Facebook during breaks.

------
kogepathic
Cue corporate IT departments everywhere advertising the slow internet speeds
as "We are helping you empathize with the developing world"

Today I found out my megacorp has been leading the charge to help me empathize
with our customers in Africa. It's a sad day when my latency to the internet
in Europe is higher than our actual satellite connection to a remote site in
Africa.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Be happy that you _have_ access to Internet in Europe. I'm sitting in an
international corporation's office in Shenzhen, China, and I have to do absurd
amounts of dancing with VPNs to be able to leave a message for my family. Oh,
and I have to do it on my own mobile connection, because no way a VPN over
corporate network will last more than 30 seconds.

:(.

------
aksx
What facebook needs to realize is that 2G is not the only factor because of
which people don't use the facebook app.

First of all the app takes too much resources and makes the phone sluggish,
especially on low end phones which are very common here. (Messenger is big
offender here)

I believe one of the reasons why whatsapp became so popular was that it was
faster to use than facebook's messenger and you could easily delete media to
save storage.

People prefer using facebook on Opera Mini on their iPhones and android phones
than using it from the app.

~~~
zamalek
> whatsapp

Whatsapp is just as bad. Disallowing it from running in the background extends
my battery life from under a day to over 2 days. Why are these messaging apps
so resource hungry?

~~~
vanderZwan
I know all of this thanks to an old lecture I once attended (not a phone dev),
so my information might be a bit off and outdated, but in broad strokes: it's
partially due to naive programming practices, but phone manufacturers are also
somewhat to blame.

Every app has to poll for new messages on their own. That means opening up a
connection just to see if something new is there.

To give an analogy that's easy to grasp: imagine a giant sluice, big enough to
fit two oil tankers. Opening a connection is like sending boats through it,
the boats are the data, and the water is the power used each time. Now this
sluice is a bit funny: once you operate it, it's very efficient and automatic,
_but it runs twenty times_. In other words, you want have at least forty big-
ass boats full of data to send through if you don't want to waste energy (to
be clear, I just pulled these numbers out of the air; and in a real sluice
that would be forty boats both ways, but internet connections are a bit
different).

Now imagine you just send a teeny tiny boat checking for new messages each
time. If there's a message, data will be sent back (other boats). If not, due
to how 2/3/4G work, _the sluice will still open and close forty times_. That'a
s LOT of wasted water. It also takes time to operate the sluice.

Not everyone who develops these apps is aware of this, so some naive app
developers _poll all the time_.

What would be amazing if the phone OS provided some sort of batching system
where these polling messages would queue up, and it would connect for all of
them at once. I dunno, maybe the newer phones have something like that.

~~~
zamalek
There's a very informative XMPP XEP[1] with mobile considerations that touches
on what you said (although that analogy of yours is great!). Where my problem
lies is: even if I was the cleaner at Whatsapp or FB I'd be making noise about
battery life, I'd do everything I could. Put another way: I struggle to
understand how a company that is about mobile doesn't put being a good mobile
citizen first and foremost.

It's not that hard to open a TCP connection, or heck, even a WebSocket. HTTP
1.1 is clearly the wrong application to use here.

[1]:
[http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0286.html#power](http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0286.html#power)

~~~
wlesieutre
> Put another way: I struggle to understand how a company that is about mobile
> doesn't put being a good mobile citizen first and foremost.

Lack of accountability? All the complaints I hear about battery life are aimed
at manufacturers, rather than the crap that we shovel on them and forget
about. Facebook taking flak over their recent background audio problems was a
rare exception.

~~~
zamalek
> Lack of accountability?

Accountability comes with the functionality that allows you to see which apps
are using battery. I recently upgraded to WP 10 and got a notification saying
"some background apps are using a lot of battery," which is how I became aware
of the culprit.

That notification is a very smart idea and I hope to see it at some point on
Android/iPhone.

------
delinka
Every software shop in the world should be designing and coding for low
connectivity speeds.

~~~
elros
Why?

Edit: It seems to me that depending on the market one targets there's not much
to be gained from designing for slow connection speeds...

~~~
izacus
Except that you get slow connection speeds pretty much everywhere as soon as
you move outside your house. Subways, commutes, etc. For crying out loud, you
even go to EDGE on AT&T when commuting in Sillicon Valley on CalTrain!

~~~
azar1
Exactly. This article really changed the way I thought about optimizing for
slow network speeds: [http://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/why-
availability/](http://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/why-availability/)

------
Oatseller
Link to the Facebook Engineering blog post

[https://code.facebook.com/posts/1556407321275493/building-
fo...](https://code.facebook.com/posts/1556407321275493/building-for-emerging-
markets-the-story-behind-2g-tuesdays/)

------
JorgeGT
They should also try using older/slower phones that are representative of
those areas. I remember that I had an LG L7 which was barely usable at all
even freshly reset.

~~~
gh0sts
I believe the FB Empathy Lab[0] is all about this sort of device testing

[0]:
[https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/656582605173858305](https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/656582605173858305)

------
Animats
Ad blocking will improve response times on slow links by about 50%. More for
really bad sites.

~~~
kale
How can I improve this on my phone? I have ad blocking and flash blocking on
my laptop, which speeds it up considerably. On my phone which is slower, lower
memory, more battery sensitive, and data capped (so ads are a bigger
nuisance), I can't find a solution that works on and off WiFi.

I'm in the process of getting a local DNS server set up at home which will
help some by blacklisting ad network IPs, but it won't help over the mobile
network.

And I'd rather not pay for a cloud server to use as DNS when I'm on the road,
plus I think Android will use Google's DNS server if other lookups fail. I
discovered this when my parent's internet stopped working for their computer
and their iPhone, but my Android worked fine. Their ISP DNS was offline.

~~~
sp332
Firefox for Android supports many addons, including uBlock Origin, Ghostery,
HTTPS Everywhere, NoScript, etc. [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/android/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/)

~~~
885895
After having had the first few addons I tried to install a good while back
tell me Firefox for Android was not supported, I gave up on trying.

I love uBlock Origin on the desktop and thanks to you now I have it on my
tablet too!

------
pnevares
An option if you'd like to try this yourself, at home:
[https://shuhaowu.com/blog/network_emulation_on_your_router.h...](https://shuhaowu.com/blog/network_emulation_on_your_router.html)

(Previously on HN here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10224547](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10224547)
)

------
eliben
Is Facebook still planning to gate the internet in India behind Facebook,
though? I recall they had plans to give folks in third world countries access
to Facebook only, which is extremely sad.

~~~
sliverstorm
Except they were going to offer that service for free, which IMO changes the
picture.

~~~
eliben
I agree that criticizing what's essentially a gift isn't "nice". But, on the
other hand, this move reeks of evil-ness. Instead of bringing 3rd world people
knowledge and freedom, we bring them Facebook. This is embarrassing.

~~~
ggreer
People like to disparage Facebook, but it can be an incredibly useful tool.
I'll give an example from my own life: Soon after I moved to Oakland, a
neighbor recommended I join the neighborhood's Facebook group. It's become
invaluable. Group members coordinate to help find missing pets, catch vandals,
report stolen vehicles, and warn others about crime. City council members are
also members of the group, so we work with them to fix problems. It's much
more efficient and convenient than the standard ways of petitioning the local
government.

This may seem like a trivial improvement, but it has caused the neighborhood
to completely turn around. Everyone is amazed by how much better and safer the
area has gotten. So I don't mind if Facebook's motives are ultimately profit-
driven. People in developing countries could greatly benefit. It's win-win.

------
somberi
I had recently started building a payment network business in India and the
bandwidth situation is constantly at the top of our minds.

What makes the situation in India peculiar is not just the lack of 3G, but the
variance within the band. It is not unusual to see "3G" connection with 15Kbs
speeds.

A recent study, which I am unable to dig into at this moment, showed that the
aggregate bandwidth of a 3G connection in India is only marginally (~18%)
faster than a 2G connection.

The second challenge we encounter is "fake" connectivity - even though the
phone shows 3G or 2G, it is not a guarantee that there exists a data network
at all.

And yet another study found that more than half of the country did not get
what upgrading to 3G meant. If and when the phone companies successfully win
the mind share of this half and encourage them to switch over to 3G, the
situation will deteriorate even further because of the load on the band.

A dated but an effective coverage of the situation -
[http://www.economist.com/node/10214756](http://www.economist.com/node/10214756)

Creating adaptive (and even offline apps, especially regulated financial
industry apps) is super-challenging from a product point.

I will be glad to answer any other questions, related to this topic.

P.S - I have spent ~15 years in NYC and a few years in London and can
empathize with the comments in this thread. But building mobile apps for
India, takes a different thinking IMHO. We need to wear the hat of a
microkernel / embedded systems developer from 8085 era.

Shameless Plug - we are hiring programmers / mathematicians to solve problems
like this. If interested, please email me. ID in my profile.

~~~
shubhamjain
There is also a problem of cellular companies with fake "unlimited" plans.
Basically, they offer 3G speeds only till a certain limit after which they
throttle it down so much that it is barely usable, like Idea Cellular[1].

I have stopped having any mobile data on my phone and mostly prefer WiFi,
since I hate paying for such a limited internet.

[1]: [http://www.ideacellular.com/idea/select-
circle?PlanType=3Gne...](http://www.ideacellular.com/idea/select-
circle?PlanType=3Gnetpre)

~~~
nhf
To be fair that's a pretty common tactic even here in the US. T-Mobile's
cheaper "unlimited data" plans are 5GB of 3G/4G with aggressive traffic
shaping afterwards that basically dings you down to 2G-ish speeds unless
you're browsing at 3AM or something. Do these companies just not disclose that
though?

------
mmatants
This is why I am perfectly happy with our team's local Vagrant development
boxes being quite sluggish - the visible lag has surfaced a few timing and UX
bugs already. It's important to feel the customer pain as your own.

------
sreejithr
Every company should have such a day in my opinion. It makes you think hard
about every KB you're cramming in your requests.

------
robk
I'm surprised Facebook UK engineering isn't driving this. Reception is
terrible country wide here

~~~
rconti
Ha, I'm glad I'm not the only one. Just posted a reply to another comment here
about my visit to the UK last fall.

------
746F7475
Even with faster speed available I used 2G for a year because I got it
basically for free. Only recently with change to my job I upgraded to 3G to
get better audio streaming while on move. Spotify worked fine when I was
stationary, but couldn't keep up with me on the highway.

------
johansch
Wonderful! - but it seems a tad late. :) Even the poorest parts of India
should be about to move to 3G (or even 4G) within the next few years due to
the more efficient usage of spectrum. Of course it would be insanely
overloaded with lots of delayed packets...

~~~
JustSomeNobody
So, what I'm hearing from you is it is not too late.

~~~
johansch
It's really, really late (8-10 years) but not too late?

------
collyw
I never bothered on having a machine upgarde at work when offered for a
similar reason. If stuff is running slow, then it will be noticable on my
mahcine rather than on the more powerful production server. That and
reinstalling everthing is a pain.

------
gotchange
I think that Chrome has a network throttling simulator in their Dev Tools that
could help and give interested people a rough idea of what to expect from the
page performance under severe network conditions.

------
zobzu
I use edge for email, no web browsing or apps. waaay too slow these days, too
much data to transfer even with images off (it used to work ok when 2G was a
first world thing)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
EDGE is semi-usable with Opera Mini.

------
dbg31415
Also known as:

* Tether Your Phone Tuesdays

* Work from Home Tuesdays

* Fucking Stupid Idea Tuesdays

"I know, let's get a bunch of really smart people, and totally fuck over their
productivity 20% of the time." Genius!

------
Sevzinn
What is Facebook? Looks like some website a ten year old boy coded.

~~~
eggie
I see you are downvoted, but I had a laugh. It looks familiar.
([https://s-media-cache-
ak0.pinimg.com/736x/01/f9/75/01f975659...](https://s-media-cache-
ak0.pinimg.com/736x/01/f9/75/01f975659e2ec1560876d9ca030e8738.jpg))

------
dguido
Can they do "Underground Thursdays"? Nearly every app degrades to unusable the
second I get on the subway.

------
vlucas
In unrelated news, Facebook employees have begun to organize "Work from home
Tuesdays".

~~~
oblio
They're smart about it:

> When a Facebook employee logs into the app any Tuesday morning, they'll see
> a prompt at the top of their News Feed asking whether they want to try out
> the slower connection for an hour.

~~~
antjanus
and then they use that info when evaluating an employee's eagerness to move
forward, be a team player etc. !

------
snarkyturtle
Of course, react minified is something like 137mb... and that's not including
any other libraries like flux.

~~~
tarr11
i assume you meant kb ...

~~~
smadge
or hyperbole ...

------
plonh
Is everyone at FB so young that they don't remember 2G in America?

~~~
dublinben
Depending on the source, the average age of their employees is between 25-28
years old. That's young enough to realistically expect that they've never
owned a smartphone without 3G.

~~~
mikeash
I don't think age matters that much. Smartphones didn't really take off until
3G was pretty common. I'd wager the vast majority of smartphone users of any
age in the US got a 3G-capable phone as their first smartphone. Speaking
personally, I'm 35 and my first smartphone was an iPhone 3GS.

------
davbeer
I like how one of the employees in the foto is wearing a react t-shirt :)

------
eitally
I'd be shocked if I learned they didn't steal this idea from Google.

<edit> Not sure why downvoted. Google has had hobbled networks like this for a
long time, for exactly the same reason.

~~~
untog
Probably being downvoted for using the word "steal". It has a negative
connotation where there should not be one.

~~~
eitally
I didn't mean it negatively. It's a brilliant idea and worth copying.

