Category: Internet

How would you rate your smartphones internet connection?

Not including WiFi, what I really want to know is over the period of an average day how happy are you with your 3G and/or 4G smartphone or tablet’s internet connection? Do you ever have moments where web pages are slow to download? Has an app ever taken forever to install, or a tweet or facebook picture upload failed?

Costs and geography aside, could you turn off your WiFi completely and generally have a decent connection at your home? At work? At the airport? At the supermarket?

It’s interesting to note that some really big company’s think that internet on mobile devices isn’t as great as it could be. Have you heard of Amazon Silk or Opera Turbo where they incorporate data compression to try and speed things up to overcome limitations of mobile browsers? I’ve even heard that Google is now working on something similar. Are these just attempts to work around current limitations of cellular 3G and 4G? Most likely, yes.

I’d give my general usage internet connection in my home area a 7 rating on a scale from 0 (no internet) to 10 (always incredible). By home area I mean the geographic location where I spend 98% of my time between home, work, shopping and visiting friends. When not developing apps on my phone, it’s primarily used for email, social media and occasional web browsing. Tethering is a different story. For tethering when I travel I’d give it a 4 rating overall. Tethering uses the bandwidth a lot more strenuously than my home area use case. And because of that it exposes any weaknesses in the internet connectivity a lot sooner and makes them much more noticeable. The typical situation I want to avoid when I travel is having to pay for a hotel internet connection. Besides, hotel internet connections in the U.S. are almost always awful in terms of download speeds, especially if you are in a hotel during a large conference.

If you are wondering if there’s anything you can do about bad cellular internet the answer is YES. First, call your provider and explain the situation in as much detail as possible. Simply calling up and saying “my internet connection is terrible” isn’t going to help. But telling them the geographic location, time of day, frequency of the problem, etc. will help immensely. And, you can always follow-up if the problem persists. Sometimes the problems are equipment malfunctions, sometimes cell towers need to be upgraded. Other times it could be the terrain, buildings and heavy foliage. All of these can degrade signals. As you can see there are many reasons why your smartphone internet could be less than desirable.

If you consistently see internet outages and other major problems and you can’t get a solid answer from your provider then you can also contact the FCC or file a public comment.

References:

FCC Online Complaint form

FCC 3G and 4G Wireless

Amazon Silk

Opera Turbo

Internet ads getting more invasive

As many websites grapple for income, they are becoming more bold in how they use ads to force your attention rather than leaving it to chance. These ads either take over a significant portion of the browser or the entire thing. To be clear, these type of ads typically happen on machines that run full, non-mobile browser versions.

Now I do appreciate that ads provide much needed funds for many of the news websites and online magazines that I frequent. However, I think websites are starting to edge their way over the acceptable line and are starting taking their cue from TV shows which blast viewers who don’t have DVRs with 50 – 70 ads per hour.

The challenge for the internet surfer and the reason why I decided to write this post is advertisers are working diligently to make it harder, if not impossible, to avoid some of these new “style” internet ads because you can’t just zap them away with a Dish Network Hopper. Some browsers do a better job of blocking these full screen ads than others. Firefox combined with Ad Blocker Plus does a commendable job while Chrome, on the other hand, seems to let just about all of them through like Black Friday shoppers rushing into a Macy’s store.

If you haven’t yet experienced these ads, here’s an overview of the types that have been interrupting my recent surfing experience. All of these are triggered when you first go to a website, or sometimes they occur when you simply open different pages within the same site. Some of these have been around for a while and I’m starting to see them show up on more websites:

  • Full screen ad with a small hyperlink that you can use to bypass it.
  • Full screen ad that won’t let you click out until after a certain time period has passed.
  • Full screen ads that take over the browser for 5 or 10 seconds and then automatically shrink. These ads don’t let you click out.
  • Video ads that automatically start when the web page loads, then you have go hunt for the video player to turn it off.
  • Ads that float over the content of the page, block a significant portion of content and don’t go away unless you click the close button or click on a suspicious looking link. These ads can also hover in the same place even when you scroll the page up or down.
  • Very large ads that automatically popup if you accidentally move the mouse cursor over ad links embedded within the content on the page. I’ve started calling these “land-mine” links because you typically aren’t expecting them to popup as you move your mouse over the web page.

What to do? You have do have some options that can partially help, so here’s a handful of suggestions. If you are on a desktop or laptop you can move to a browser like Firefox that has add-ins like Ad Blocker Plus to significantly reduce the number of ads. You can stick to using a mobile smartphone browser and only visit mobile versions of your favorite sites. Mobile sites typically have less invasive ads (so far anyway). But personally I think that surfing gets tiring after looking at a tiny phone browser for extended periods of time. You can vote with your feet and simply avoid sites that annoy you, but that’s not a viable option for some people. You can stick with RSS feeds, but then you lose the richness of a full web page. And, you can also send feedback to websites whose ads you find particular invasive, because they won’t know unless you say something.

 

Smartphones greatness hampered by limited cell and internet service

Compared to good old land-line phones, smartphone reliability is mediocre at best because it largely depends on you always being connected to the internet. This post brings to light that we’ve traded massively reliable twisted pair telephone service and mostly reliable home internet for something that, at least to me, is barely tolerable and only just “good enough”. Smartphones have become popular in spite of connectivity issues. Where are still in the stone age of cellular service.

How dependable? You could “always” depend on the old fashioned, hard-wired land-line phones to work even during natural disasters. In fact, I once grabbed a pair of phone wires from the rubble a house completely destroyed by a Class 5 tornado and was able to use a field phone to make a call. Try to do that with a smartphone! Nowadays, most of what we do with our smartphones is 100% dependant on an internet and cellular service connection. And, it’s not like you are dragging around a dedicated T1 service and ethernet cable where ever you go. If the cellular connection is bad we either have to wait until we can find a Starbucks with WiFi or simply go without phone calls, text messages, emails and surfing the internet. In fact even Starbucks connectivity can be spotty if there are a lot of people at Starbucks working on uploading or viewing their family Christmas picture albums. 

No internet connection? Sorry, but you won’t able to use Skype and gasp…you’ll have to use your cell phone minutes to make a voice call.

Overloaded system. Cellular companies are making it even more challenging with tiered pricing for internet usage, phone plans that don’t include roaming, and congested networks that are sloooowly being upgraded. They say these pricing approaches help maximize existing bandwidth for everyone, or perhaps it’s to help them maximize revenue?

It also seems that the rate of smartphone adoption may have outpaced the networks ability to keep up in many dense urban areas and outside of those areas away from major highways you may just be stuck without cellular service if you don’t have a landline.

Spotty coverage areas. There are certain parts of my house and certain areas at work that have dead zones to cell service. I work in a densely populated urban area and some co-workers, depending on which cell service they use, have to step outside to get a “good enough” signal to carry on a conversation. It’s becoming more common for cell providers to offer private amplification repeaters that improve service to a specific house or building, and the funny thing is these rely on good old land-line connections.

How about in emergencies and disasters? If a cell tower goes down then all communication is wiped out completely…remember Hurricane Katrina and Sandy? If/when cell service is restored and you still don’t have power at your house, you will have to turn off your phone and use its remaining battery life wisely. Turn it on, make a quick call or send/receive text messages and then turn it off again. And, when the battery is dead…it will stay dead until you find a working power outlet.

What’s the future hold? What I’d really like to see is guaranteed service, like the uptime agreements we used to have with T1s, T2s and T3s. You could expect a minimum amount of service and generally speaking the provider would try and meet those conditions. With the way cell service is distributed today it’s anyone’s guess whether you have access to cell or internet at any particular point in time.

Probably the best thing to do is call your provider and complain when coverage needs improvement. Most companies seems to document these issues although its not clear who looks at that information. It seems reasonable however that the more people giving feedback the better information the cell providers will have to make decisions.