
Show HN: Lag – Know Before You Go - joeblau
https://lag.app
======
thruflo22
I moved recently from the UK, where my home and office both had fiber, to live
in a tiny picturesque village in the Istrian hills in Croatia.

Initially, my 4g router was getting a signal strength of -110 to -120db,
corresponding to two bars and zoom video not working. Spent €90 on an outdoor
aerial. Plugged it into the router. Signal now averages -85, four to five bars
on the router, zero issues with video calls.

My point being: there’s more than one way to skin a cat and you can often
improve your mobile signal if you want to.

~~~
Hamuko
How are you running the outdoor cable to the router? I find the hardest part
of this setup actually getting the cable from outside the house to inside the
house.

~~~
wffurr
It's similar to installing an outdoor power outlet:
[https://www.familyhandyman.com/project/how-to-add-an-
outdoor...](https://www.familyhandyman.com/project/how-to-add-an-outdoor-
outlet/)

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biztos
I like this idea, but I see two potential problems:

1\. It might route too many people to where the network is fast, thus making
the network not fast anymore and wasting a lot of people's time as they "go."

2\. It might also route a bunch of "digital nomads" to my local art café where
they will hog the tables, like Waze did with commuter traffic to my
residential street.

How do you avoid those two problems? Or at least the first one, which is a
problem for your target users?

~~~
renewiltord
Make your internet slow at #2. Presumably you don't want an army of people all
on the Internet at your art cafe anyway.

As for #1, there are physical capacity limits you are likely to first exhaust.
Only so many people will fit.

~~~
biztos
Actually two of my cafés have a "no computers in the evening" rule, one also
has a "no computers on the terrace" rule. Now that I think about it more, with
fast mobile data I don't think network speed is going to be much of a factor
for places like that.

For #1, if you have ten people all on Zoom meetings at the same time, isn't
that going to kill your fast-for-a-café bandwidth?

~~~
JoshTriplett
> For #1, if you have ten people all on Zoom meetings at the same time, isn't
> that going to kill your fast-for-a-café bandwidth?

Not unless they all start at the same time. If they start a little staggered
from each other, there will be time to boot the first person out for _trying
to do a video call in a cafe around other humans_ before the next one starts.

Working in a cafe is completely reasonable, and wouldn't disturb other people.
_Taking a call_ is ridiculous.

~~~
beisner
Eh, from a noise level there’s no difference with having an in-person meeting
at a cafe, which happens all the time and is not bothersome (depending on the
cafe).

~~~
JoshTriplett
There's a noticeable difference between an in-person meeting and a call. Most
people are a lot louder in the latter.

------
harha
One more issue when going somewhere: not all places have useful 4G offerings.

In France, Germany and Italy for instance I couldn't find a monthly prepaid 4G
offer with unlimited data, especially in France you frequently even need a
local bank account and in Germany 4G is so bad in many places that it wouldn't
make a difference how much data is in the plan. Other places like Austria
offer monthly prepaid as low as EUR 20, though speed may be limited to
25-40Mbps, which should suffice for 1:1 video calls.

My solution for now is to at least have my workstation connected somewhere
with a fast connection and someone who could reboot it if needed, connect to
that from where I am and have that do all the heavy lifting. Doesn't solve the
video conference issue though.

Having flexible and reasonably quick connectivity, or an EU wide subscription,
would really lift the value of locations outside of cities - I don't
understand how badly this is done compared to other infrastructure investments
(e.g. roads are pretty amazing in Western Europe and not that bad in places
I've been in Eastern Europe compared to the US). I hope non government actors
like Starlink manage to close this gap.

------
bajsejohannes
Sorry for being pedantic, but this app is measuring _bandwidth_ , not _lag_
(latency).

See for example
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lag](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lag)

------
square_usual
That's a snazzy looking app, but why iOS only, and why iOS 14 only?

~~~
JoshTriplett
In particular, why not a webpage? This doesn't need to be an app.

~~~
simonbarker87
Probably a side project for a full time iOS dev who wanted an excuse to mess
about with SwiftUI and decided to use the tool they are most familiar with

------
steelbrain
See also: [https://www.hotelwifitest.com/](https://www.hotelwifitest.com/)

Although from personal experience, data on Hotel Wifi Test is often not
reliable, at least for Dubai

~~~
ipsum2
Implementing this idea as a web app instead of an iOS exclusive seems like the
right move.

------
SergeAx
I found this service quite useful, thank you!

But please, why it should be a mobile app? Looking at the landing page
animation it looks like there's nothing plain (like in "jQuery only for fancy
animation") web site cannot do.

------
stevenguh
I heard of a similar idea in an Acquired episode:
[https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/special-acquired-x-my-
first...](https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/special-acquired-x-my-first-
million) Wondering if this is somehow related, or you came up with the same
idea independently

~~~
joeblau
This is actually what I was listening to on Friday morning that prompted me to
build this.

~~~
adventured
How long was the build time start to finish?

~~~
joeblau
30 hours not including 8 hours of sleep, 1 hour bike ride, shower, eating and
all of that fun stuff.

------
somada141
As others have mentioned the bottleneck is typically getting a good mobile
plan especially if you intend to move around a larger region across borders.
The EU has sort of gotten to a point where roaming costs are no more (with the
right plan). E.g. I have 20GB/m I can use anywhere in Europe for 20pounds/m
(Vodafone) without incurring roaming costs but once you introduce video-
conferencing or video streaming that's not gonna cut it regardless of how good
the signal is.

Thus I've found in the past 11 months that I've been nomadicking around Europe
that you often depend on getting some good wifi which is quite the hassle
(especially in rural destinations). I have high-hopes for apps like this to
create a knowledge-base for areas with good broadband.

------
griko
Love the app! Straightforward with no extra stuff here and there. I’d like to
share some suggestions after using it for a while:

\- adding an option to partially omit or edit the address would be great since
not every part of the world shows the exact address accurately

\- inform what datas are stored (i did wonder why they show the latitude and
longitude, because privacy reasons)

\- add prompts for isp/carrier provider, subscription/plan type, and other
granular details so people know what to pick or expect

\- minor improvements on the user interaction, like autofocusing on the input
so users can instantly type, or tap an entry to view more details

Overall, looking forward to share the app to my fellow iOS 14 users!

------
eps
WiFi speeds fluctuate heavily, e.g. workdays vs weekdays, lunch hours vs
mornings vs nights, etc.

So as good looking as this app is, the real challenge is with the accuracy of
its data and keeping it from getting stale. Not sure if the OP realizes this,
but it's a 24/7 grind that also requires a sizable userbase.

It's not a bad idea in its core, but this belongs in the OS itself _and_ it
should also be On by default to manage to collect enough data to be useful and
to keep it current. I doubt that an opt-in model, especially in a form of an
installable app, would work well enough to produce any reasonable coverage.

------
nicbou
What an excellent pitch! It's right there at the top, and it says exactly what
the app does.

This is a refreshingly straightforward design.

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areille
Nice app, do you plan to develop an Android version ?

However, I'm not sure to agree with all your points. Since two weeks I work at
my grandpa's in French countryside. 2.7Mbps download and 0.5Mbps upload. I can
use Zoom (no video), watch Youtube (480p), and use Slack with no problem at
all.

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mothsonasloth
This seems like another "silicon valley" issue, solving problems for an elite
few people in society who have the luxury to bum about for 6 months working in
hostels (if you can truly say they are working as effectively as they did
before they put a backpack on).

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gverrilla
this reminds me of wifimagic[0]. This kind of community data leveraging is
absolutely awesome!

0: [https://wifimagic.com/](https://wifimagic.com/)

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flingo
Are there any details on who's providing this app, who's running the site, and
what they'll do with collected data?

The ToS and privacy policy are identical, and only refer to an app called
"velo" and a company called "copilot LLC", and that their method of contact is
"Joe Blau."

This seems very strange to me. (unless this is a "move fast, break things,
collect GDPR fines" sort of thing)

------
sammy2244
Seems like a cool idea, but when you are testing download/upload where are you
testing to? When I visit Google’s speedtest it shows me drastically slower
speeds than if I go to fast.com or speed.cloudflare.com. Speeds to AWS
cloudfront, fastly, cloudflare, google will always be different especially in
countries /areas without PoPs

