Techgoondu » Akamai

Akamai: online viewers start abandoning videos after 2 seconds of loading

Zen Soo — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 05:06:41 +0000

Internet users are willing to wait just a mere two seconds for an online video to load before losing interest and moving on to something else, a recent study by Internet content delivery network Akamai has found.

For each second more that a video takes to load, the “abandonment rate” goes up 5.8 per cent, it revealed earlier this week.

The study also found that viewers are more impatient when waiting for short videos, such as news clips, than longer videos such as TV episodes or movies.

(Viewers are more patient when loading longer videos, such as movies. Source: Akamai Technologies)

The quality of the Internet connection can also be a reason why people give up waiting, according to the survey released early this week. The company had analysed how 6.7 million Internet users around the world watched online videos some 23 million times.

Mobile phone users are the most patient while viewers on fibre connections are the least so, it found. Either way, if users don’t manage to load a video or are interrupted while watching a clip, they are less likely to return to the site to watch more videos.

The study was conducted by Ramesh Sitaraman, an Akamai fellow and professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and S Shunmuga Krishnan, a senior software engineer at Akamai. The report can be viewed in full here.

Akamai: content providers have to optimise for mobile too

Alfred Siew — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 04:16:21 +0000

Content providers will have to start footing the bill and optimising the experience for smartphone users, as mobile networks around the world burst at the seams with congestion, according to content distribution firm Akamai.

The vice president of its mobile business, Pedro Santos, said content companies – not just telecom operators rolling out new networks – will have to make mobile websites load faster on the small screen, if they are to earn valuable dollars from users on the move.

“There will be a shift in thinking at content providers. They are losing customers over mobile if they don’t optimise their content delivery,” he told Techgoondu in an interview earlier this month.

A combination of compression technology and caching can help alleviate some of the network jam that mobile users are facing everywhere, according to Akamai, which has made a business out of optimising websites for the wired Internet.

It believes that increasingly, banks, online shops and other businesses that have users transacting on the go will be keen to use its technology to make the experience smoother.

These content providers who make money out of each transaction would pay more to ensure a smooth experience for users, unlike say, a video site that does not care as much about delivery of its content to phones, said Santos, who was in Singapore to meet customers.

“The economics are different for video versus banking transactions… the banking guys are more willing to spend to optimise (the mobile experience),” he argued.

According to Akamai, a typical desktop website takes an average of three seconds to load, while a mobile website takes a good nine seconds to load on a mobile phone.

The company is offering ways to cache content at mobile gateways, in the same way it helps companies cache their Internet content around the world for quick access by users everywhere.

Millions of hits can saturate and bring down a server, say, when Apple launches a new phone and people rush to catch a glimpse. What Akamai offers brands like Apple is a way to distribute and cache this content on local servers.

For example, the first person in Singapore who watches a new Apple video will access it from the United States, but subsequent users who fire up the video will grab the cached version stored in servers in Singapore. This model of content delivery networks (CDNs) has made live videos such as U2′s concert in 2009 viewable by users everywhere.

Akamai’s Santos said content owners now are looking to a similar model to distribute content to mobile users. At the same time, images and videos – the main items clogging up mobile networks – can be detected early and compressed before they are sent over the air to users, he added.

Telecom operators will welcome the idea. For so long, they have been paying the bill for more expensive and newer networks, which get saturated soon after they are launched. Then consumers get angry when they cannot watch the latest movie trailers smoothly on the phone.

“Devices have been deployed to consumers much faster than the infrastructure,” said Santos. “But mobile networks will start to catch up over time and the experience will improve when content providers start optimising for mobile.”

Goondu guide to fibre broadband in Singapore

Alfred Siew — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 20:02:47 +0000

So, you’re finally getting the fibre optic cable set up at home and seem all ready to hook up to Singapore’s fast lane that promises faster downloads. Then, all of a sudden, questions come up.

How should I run the fibre optic cable at home? How should I set up up my home network? Which service provider should I sign up with?

As a new fibre broadband user who just signed up two weeks ago, I can tell you I have asked all those questions, and there are solutions, sort of, if you know what you want with the new service.

First, here are a few things you need to know:

1. How fast?
Though the fibre optic services boast speeds going up to a crazy 1,000Mbps (costing over S$300 a month), you are still limited by how fast content is delivered over the Net.

It’s like this: you may now have a new highway built next to your home, but the char kway teow store you drive to everyday for your lard fix is still only served by a small lane that is always jammed up by fellow drivers, and there is no other way to get there. You are held up all the same.

On the Net, there are many such small lanes as well. In fact, most sites are hosted on servers that offer nowhere near the top speeds you can get on your fibre service. So, you are still limited by whatever capacity they have on their end - this could be as low as under 100Kbps for some small sites or up to 100Mbps on sites hosted with Singapore ISPs like StarHub.

As such, with many websites and other Internet content, you will NOT get speed-ups with the new broadband service.

But some “overseas” sites such as AMD, Nvidia and Apple, for example, cache their content all over the world, including in Singapore, so that their servers are not overloaded when a lot of traffic hits their sites, say, to download drivers or to watch a new iPad video.

You can expect really fast downloads for such “cached” content, especially if the owner has paid a lot of money to deliver it to a place like Singapore. You’ll also get fast downloads, say, at EA Singapore, which is based in Singapore, and which offers fast PC game downloads to folks here.

With EA Singapore, you can get about 30Mbps downloads, and at times, close to 100Mbps for some of these cached sites. But you will almost never get 1,000Mbps (if you know a site that is as fast, let me know).

So, is this top speed a “fake” top speed? No, the truth is you will still get the capacity, which means you can have concurrent downloads, all amounting to the speed you pay for. For some folks, this means downloading stuff over bit-torrent all day, without ever worrying about choking the bandwidth to their homes.

Some ISPs do throttle the download speed of bit-torrent downloads, but take with a pinch of salt what people complain about on forums. There are so many variables, for example, whether an ISP throttles certain types of traffic only at certain times, and between certain groups of subscribers. Unfortunately, the only good test of this is to try things out yourself.

2. Why sign up?
So, with all these “disclaimers”, why bother signing up for fibre? There are two reasons. One is that they can be cheaper than traditional broadband options. M1, which has some of the cheapest offers now, provides a 25Mbps service for S$39 a month – cheaper than StarHub’s cable modem services, which give you only a 6Mbps service for about S$35 a month.

So, even if you “don’t need” the speed, you can get cheaper or faster deals than what you have got currently. That makes it a no-brainer to sign up with the cheaper fibre broadband options now.

For those who are heavy users, the download speed is just one thing to look forward to. There’s also upload speed. Typically, a synchronous technology like FTTH (fibre to the home) means that you can upload as fast as you download – a big change to the older asynchronous technologies such as ADSL and cable modem.

What this means is that you can share files with friends in Singapore a lot faster. I’ve tested the uploads for my M1 fibre service (100Mbps down/50Mbps up), and the speeds are miles faster. One of my pals who used to download at 1Mbps from me now gets more than 10Mbps (it’s not 50Mbps, possibly because of the poor peering arrangements between his ISP and mine).

And here’s something that will interest bit-torrent users: for some file downloads, the faster you upload means the faster you can download as well (based on a superior share ratio). So, the upload speeds do count for something.

3. Teething problems
I’d advise anyone who is taking up fibre optic broadband to be patient. I’ve been lucky so far to not have had any problems, but some users have reported occasional disconnections, while others have reported fibre installers for damaging existing cable TV wires.

Users will have to give the technology time, as it matures. After all, the network is still being rolled out to parts to Singapore right now, and will only be complete by the end of 2012.

To be fair, the new fibre broadband services are already rolled out in a much better way than the first wave of broadband services back in the late 1990s. Anyone remember waiting 45 minutes on the phone when their costly SingTel Magix ADSL service went offline?

If you are all set, then let’s have a checklist of what to look out for when installing the fibre. Read on.

Commentary: “Real broadband speeds” calls are barking up the wrong tree

Alfred Siew — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 11:29:24 +0000

When companies try to hide information about their products and services from consumers, it’s a black and white case: let’s hammer them to be more transparent.

Unfortunately, recent calls for Singapore’s telecom operators to declare an “average” surfing speed or “minimum guaranteed speed” are as misguided as they are unhelpful in solving the biggest problems users face here – a lack of content and inconsistent links to overseas sites.

Trust me when I say I’m just as frustrated a broadband user as the next here, but many of these calls come from a lack of understanding about how the Internet works, and what really plagues the average user at home. Rather than get to the root of the problem, they obfuscate the situation and muddle things.

First of all, the government regulator here already publishes real upload and download speeds, known as throughput, on its website, so folks asking for more transparency should really first have a look at that and see what’s missing and what should be included.

And to explain broadband speeds, it helps to look at another Singapore obsession: cars.

Even if you buy an Audi R8 supercar capable of 300kmh or 400kmh, you still travel on the same roads here as the average Kia or Toyota driver, which means you suffer from the same jams on the expressways here during peak-hour traffic. Result: 30km/h or less on busy roads.

Does that mean that Audi should thus sell its cars with a “minimum guaranteed speed” of 30km/h on its brochures instead of the 300km/h that the engine is capable of? Would it be deceiving drivers who readily fork out several times the cost of a Toyota or Kia?

If that seems absurd, then the current calls for so-called “real” broadband speeds like “average surfing speed” or “minimum guaranteed speed” in telcos’ advertisements do not make sense either.

Just like Audi cannot guarantee how fast you can drive your car over different roads, your telco cannot guarantee a promised average or minimum speed to every single site its users surf to because they do not own every single site on the Net and cannot buy a speedy link to all sites.

The main reason why many sites, say, a Tudou.com or Download.com, is slow is because many of these overseas sites do not deliver their content at such high speeds that we enjoy over our broadband connection.

Even if you have a 100Mbps fibre optic broadband service, it won’t do any good if the max that the website you are downloading the file from offers just 300Kbps to each user, depending on the load that the server allows. What can your Singapore broadband operator do about that? Not much, unless it gets the content or website provider to locate its data in Singapore.

Another point that has been raised is that telcos are not being upfront about download speeds. But really, are they not? The most important content – anti-virus updates, driver updates and even Windows updates – are now available at much faster speeds than a few years ago, and often close to the speeds promised on paper.

Don’t believe that? Try downloading a game from the EA Singapore website, or a site that has “mirrored” or “cached” its content here, such as AMD and Nvidia, whose drivers are downloaded all the time by users here.

I subscribe to a 16Mbps StarHub link, which gives me as much as 1.4MB per second for such links. That’s roughly 11.2Mbps – close enough to the 16Mbps that StarHub promises, considering I still have several other apps running in the background.

There are many things I don’t like about my StarHub connection – like slow links during peak hours, but more on that later – yet, I won’t be so fast to say StarHub or indeed any service provider in Singapore is not “coming clean” or “deceiving” customers.

That’s because they do deliver near the top speed when the content is available to the speedy network here. The problem, as always with a small market like Singapore, has been local content, and while it is trickling in, there are still thousands of websites that are slow to our users here.

Blaming SingTel and StarHub is just an easy way to find a scapegoat without looking at the bigger problem, which is getting more content providers to base or cache their contents here via content distributors such as Akamai.

This is not to say the IDA (Infocomm Development Authority) should be lenient towards the telcos, or that nothing should be done. On the contrary, the IDA should be more stringent, but in asking for transparency, it should ask for the right details, not a halfway-house solution.

Let’s stop for a moment and ask what is this transparency that we are demanding for. Should telcos advertise an “average” speed based on where its users surf to each month, considering that this changes because users surf to different places offering varying download speeds each month?

Does this not confuse users looking for a guide to how fast a service is? Think about the car analogy again: imagine going to the Audi showroom and finding that this month, the car is capable of only an average 30km/h, while last week it was 50km/h. The hardware is still the same, and it can really run at a top speed of 300km/h, but hey, people want “real” speeds.

If that sounds absurd, then you’ve understood where this recent speed debate is going. It’s barking up the wrong tree.

Top speeds should remain as a guide to what is on offer. And if the IDA, which first threw up this question last month by asking if it should make telcos reveal “real” speeds, really wants to improve broadband speeds here, it should look at things in detail, and not to grab some populist headlines in the newspapers, at the expense of the telcos it regulates.

Here’s how.

Instead of a meaningless figure, the IDA should get telcos to show how fast they link up to, say, the top 10 sites that users here go to. If these throughput tests are run by IDA, they should give a transparent, unbiased view of which telco is giving users the best bang for buck.

Let the market do its work here. When telcos find that users are being slowed down when they access, say, Tudou.com or their World of Warcraft server, they will have to either expand their overseas bandwidth or somehow strike a deal with the content providers to base their content here, to keep users happy.

Make it mandatory for every telco to publish this chart of how fast it performs against a competitor in its advertisements, and you will get many Internet engineers at SingTel and StarHub pulling their socks up in no time.

The whole point is in making sure the consumer gets the “real speed” that a service provider offers. It’s not about a confusing “average” or “minimum guaranteed speed”, but a snapshot of what a telco actually offers every month to the top online destinations that users go to.

Just like on the roads, no one can guarantee you a promised speed on the Net. But you can make choices based on experience. If you are serious in studying how fast a broadband service really is, just follow its published speeds over a few months and you’ll get the information to make a better buying decision.