Wireless Network Performance Is Anything But Consistent
Its a simple thing, right? The carrier Verizon
, AT&T, Sprint, etc. sends a signal to the tower nearest you, and then beams it down to your mobile phone. You navigate to a website, the signal shoots through the air and bingo, there it is. How hard could that be?
In reality, very hard. Between that amorphous Internet where the site you seek lives and the shiny screen in your hand is a tangled web of equipment and circuitry, switching devices, base station controllers, load balancers, etc., etc. degrees more complex and circuitous than a wireline signal with the added complications of buildings, trees, hills and valleys, the motion of your speeding vehicle, and legions of other users competing for the same limited bandwidth. Its a veritable conspiracy to keep speeds low and frustration high.
The big culprit undermining a fluid mobile experience is the L word: Latency. Its the lag in time dead space to the user it takes for a signal to travel the network. Every element along the way each of those switches, hubs, routers, etc. takes its L toll. And every request a site initiates through the mobile browser for a URL, an image, a script, or an object means traversing the network and all its latencies all over again.
And, unnervingly, wireless network performance is anything but consistent. The flood of new smartphone users and exploding demand for data services strains the wireless networks, even as carriers race to add capacity. Network speeds can vary dramatically depending on location, time of day, and even current events. A user in San Francisco late on a weekday afternoon may find Web browsing unbearably slow, whereas a user in Baltimore at the same time may be impressed with how fast sites load.
Add it all up cumulative latency and inconsistent network performance and that is what the end user experience is. This is why it is so critical to have a mobile approach that acknowledges the inherent challenges of cellular transmission, and makes every effort to minimize them. Here are three areas where you can make sure your site is performing at its best, even if the mobile network isn't.
Gone are the days when a website was a single entity living in a single home on a server in a companys data center or on a hosting service. For years now, third-party content has made for richer website experiences (and in some cases made site owners richer) whether in terms of content feeds, video, tracking, ads and more.
As you might expect to hear since youve read this far: Thats all well and good for the desktop Web, but on mobile, not so much. Third-party content may not be optimized for mobile, and its always changing. It also automatically increases the number of domains that must be looked up, which is likely to slow things down.
Introduction of third-parties means loss of control, so the objective is to get as much of that control back as possible. If the objects are static images or static scripts, for example bring them in-house and host them with your site. If the content and the data center thats hosting it are truly out of your control, then constant vigilance is required. Monitor all of it to make sure its not dragging down the performance of your site and if it is, deal with it at the source or get rid of it.
by: Chris samuels
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