View low bandwidth version

Archive for the ‘Web’ Category

Network Management Basics

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

I’ve been asked for some advice on how schools and universities can take advantage of the increased bandwidth available with the arrival of the TEAMS and EASSY submarine cables in East Africa.

Management of Internet connections is a big subject. Whole books have been written about it, including the freely downloadable How To Accelerate Your Internet (BMO Book). However, for anyone who doesn’t have time to read it, I will briefly summarise the most important points that I can think of:

  • have a clear, simple and strict Internet access policy, and enforce
    it.
  • have enough bandwidth, AT LEAST 3 kbps per computer, uncontended. So if you have 1000 computers, you should have 3 MBits dedicated bandwidth, or 60 MBps if it’s shared or contended with a 20:1 contention ratio (typical ISPs).
  • have competent network administrators. If you don’t have them, then hire or train them.
  • implement good network management practices, e.g. by following the advice of the BMO Book.
  • start by solving the problems that users complain most about, to give them the best possible service.
  • monitor your network to understand how Internet bandwidth is being used.
  • block misuses of Internet access that are causing problems for legitimate use of the Internet connection.
  • ensure that client PCs have good, fast antivirus, perform well, are
    regularly reformatted and reimaged, and have strong local security to prevent unauthorized software installation.

Far more information on all of these topics can be found in the BMO book. I suggest starting with the Introduction if you’re interested.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Censorship, Education, Infrastructure, Internet, Software, Web, bandwidth, security | 2 Comments »

Lopad: high speed collaborative text editing over low bandwidths

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

Video of lopad team at #crisiscampLDN

Note: lopad is still a work in progress. The #crisiscampLDN team have made good progress, there will be a first cut up in the next few days. Getting it to the optimised, low bandwidth tool it needs to be is a project for the next few weeks.

I’m in “the ball room” (the other one’s called “the tree room” in case you’re wondering where the heck we are) at #crisiscampLDN and I’m thoroughly impressed by the efforts of @nickstreet and @mrchrisadams from Headshift.

What are they doing? Something really cool – making the first release of lopad. Check out the intro on blip.tv from @leashless above.

What is lopad?

Aptivate makes a service called loband – it takes high-bandwidth webpages and makes them work quickly on slow connections.

There’s a demand (e.g. from staff at UNFAO and users in Rwanda) for a related service, tuned for low bandwidth environments, that lets users easily collaborate over a text file.

This is the first addition to the lo* (pronounced lo-star) family of products: lopad.

Think of it as a super-lightweight Google Docs with no registration, instant visibilty of other user’s changes and fast performane on all internet connections.

There’s already a product called Etherpad which has been open-sourced since Google bought the company (to absorb the team into Google Wave). They plan to discontinue the public service in a few months time. In response to this, there are already some other public instances of Etherpad (e.g. PiratePad) as well as many private ones, but the immediate goal of the lopad project is to:

  • Create lopad.org – a free public instance of etherpad, promoted for use in the relief and development sectors but open to anyone
  • Optimise lopad.org to perform well on low bandwidth and/or high latency connections

Some of the things we’re going to be doing along the way will be getting a production server up and running, getting a copy of etherpad on there, rebranding it to “lopad”, analysing the opportunities for improving the bandwidth performance of the system and then implementing them.

In true meta-style, there’s more info and developer notes online at: http://etherpad.com/crisiscampLDN

Some highlights from the above:

I also think this will be a valuable tool for use by people in the Crisis Camp effort.

So: friends, coders, countrymen, come and join in!

Tags:
Posted in Crisis Camp, Internet, Web, bandwidth | No Comments »

Low Bandwidth Web: Opera Turbo

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Aptivate (then Aidworld) was founded in 2003 by a group of techies and aidworkers wrestling with the question: how can you make the web usable for relief workers in the field?

Opera Turbo in Action

Opera Turbo in Action

The problem then was access to bandwidth and the cost of that access.

Typical satellite phone connection speeds were 9.6Kbps (think of cold treacle flowing uphill or the state of dial-up in the early 90s) and the cost would be anywhere from $2 to $20 per minute.

5 minutes to download something like cnn.com made it unusable and $100 for the privilege made it unaffordable.

We came up with loband – a free online service that simplifies web pages. It downloads them remotely, trims them down and  returns them to the user in a lightweight format. It can offer a 5-10x reduction in bandwidth used.

Fast forward 6 years and it’s interesting how similar the story is.

Some of us now have  fast desktop & mobile web connectivity, but websites have gotten heavier (the first page I get to on Facebook is 1.25MB…)  and we don’t always have access to our quick connections.

The fundamental issue is still there: the web can be slow and expensive if you’re not on a fast “unlimited data” connection.

Opera have been doing great things with their mobile browser for some time. They recently introduced the Opera Turbo feature into their desktop edition. The concept is similar to loband but its designed to integrate transparently into the browser.

Opera route all relevant traffic via their servers and return a compressed stream of data to the browser containing the content you want. From the picture above, you can see that they compress graphics to save bandwidth.

One thing I suspect they do (although I haven’t checked) is reduce the overall number of requests between the browser and the server. Going back to Facebook – it takes 92 HTTP requests to build my home page. That becomes painful if you’re on a low bandwidth, high latency connection. You effectively incur an overhead for each of those 92 requests.

If Opera can turn that into fewer, overall smaller requests – the Norwegians rock even more than I think they already do.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Appropriate Technology, Internet, Software, Web, bandwidth | 3 Comments »

Web Optimisation: Google Page Speed

Friday, June 5th, 2009

Bandwidth management and optimisation (BMO) is one of Aptivate’s strategic areas.

Optimising websites is a key ingredient.

Google Page Speed in Firefox

Google Page Speed in Firefox

Google just introduced Page Speed which looks like it could be a useful tool. Much like Yahoo’s YSlow it sits on top of Firebug and tells you when you’ve done something naughty.

Aptivate publish web design guidelines targeted at authors developing content for audiences on low bandwidth connections. Google also publish a set of best practices for web performance.

This is interesting – we were motivated to write the guidelines because users in developing countries have a hard time accessing poorly optimised content. Google are motivated to write similar guidelines because they recognise that speed should be a commerical concern.

I think there’s a broadly shared goal that ultimately means good things for those on slower connections.

A quick aside on BMO:

Chris and Martin worked with KENET – The Kenya Education Network Trust, running bandwidth management workshops for network administrators in Kenya, in June 2009.

We’ve posted an overview of the workshop and resources we’re using on our OER Wiki.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Web, bandwidth | No Comments »

Newer Entries »